No such thing as ‘Fortress Ewood’ BLUE-EYED BOY’S VIEW
THERE are a number of clichés which no self-respecting football writer should ever allow himself to be drawn into utilising.
Some are forgivable in some cases but more often plain inaccurate (anyone who has played 25 games for your club being described as “a legend” - see Michel Salgado for a case in point) while others become such woolly, nebulous concepts – the “box-to-box midfielder” or the “90-minute player” that repeated use renders them largely meaningless. All midfielders are box-tobox, there is no-one playing football who can’t actually run 60 yards, the best ones just turn up in either box at precisely the right time on a consistent basis.
While hackneyed epithets for such mythical beasts as the False Nine and the Ball-Playing Libero are one thing, there is, however, no more rash or foolhardy, almost certain prelude-to-disaster expression than that which sees fans, managers or players describe their home ground as “Fortress this-or-that.”
It is understandable that football folk value the importance of being strong and hard-to-beat on their own midden but to describe your stadium thus is tempting fate even after a good run, as we at Ewood found last season when a run of four consecutive wins for Paul Lambert’s side was precisely so heralded – only for us to lose the subsequent three, draw the fourth and finish the season with the first win in five at home, a ratio which has continued into the current season.
Those of you adept in mathematics will have worked out that that’s two wins in the last 10 home games, hardly suggesting that even with a favourable portion of matches at our gaff to come that the place is about to assume the monolithic status of some kind of inpenetrable citadel.
But Owen Coyle is a man with almost a Keanesque capacity for blarney-stone bluster, quite fitting for a man whose given middle name is after (Saint) Columba, an Irish monk who spread Christianity to the masses through powerful oratory.
The Great Beyond lies unknown still but one hopes for the faithful that Columba’s preachings had a less tenuous link with reality than the worst of Coyle’s rambling rubbish.
There’s no such thing as Fortress Ewood until the wins and points stack up and both Coyle and those journalists who even allowed the sub-editors to consider headlines built around this most vacuous of phrases need to give their heads a wobble.
True, on paper home games against Ipswich and Forest in the next few days represent an opportunity to gather some momentum against two more sides barely firing on half cylinders at this stage, but my heart sank even when reading that Mick McCarthy’s side hadn’t scored for four games and that the decidedly contrasting no-nonsense Tractor Boys’ boss described the current run as one of the most difficult of his career.
If a little leprechaun appeared on his shoulder and asked who he fancied playing to end such a sequence.....(answers on a postcard please)?
With a strike force available of Leon Best, Luke Varney and Tom Lawrence one can only imagine just how the scoreless run might end and fear the worst.
While firing blanks themselves they don’t concede many either.
Forest too have struggled and are without a win in seven league and cup games since August. They do score in most games – only Arsenal have prevented them doing so during that sequence – but like ourselves they have conceded in every game in every competition this season, letting in 30 in 14 games.
If we really do have an impressive array of firepower now and a constant tangible attacking threat, and I’m far from convinced, it’s now or never as far as the proof of the pudding goes.
The time for consoling ourselves with how many points we could have had or how many we deserved is gone now, anything less than four points from these two represents another failure and Coyle’s chirpy silly talk will be wearing extremely thin.