He heard the booing. He probably loved it. After all, he’d already won. Four minutes after plunging a dagger into the heart of his old club, his number was held up by the fourth official. As the catcalls rained down, Marko Arnautovic turned towards the Boothen End, crossed his arms and gave them the ‘Iron’ symbol synonymous with his new club. It was his day. It was painful.
Relitigating the Arnautovic transfer can wait for another time, but my abiding memory of that miserable November afternoon is that it was the moment I realised we were going to be relegated. In a game that demanded a statement performance, Stoke produced a rotten surrender, one of a team whose legs, heart and soul were fading fast. You could smell relegation on us that day. You could hear it wheezing out of us.
That same death rattle could be heard loud and clear at Hillsborough on Saturday. Even a goalless draw would have been unacceptable in the circumstances, struggling to lay a glove on a side reduced to 10 men after 41 minutes (and who’d previously struggled to win at home with 11). To lose convincingly, conceding the same goal twice in the process, laid bare the systemic failings at the heart of this winless run.
It was imperative to harvest a decent points haul from the fixtures against Luton, Cardiff and Wednesday given the festive period brings us three of the current top four. To take just one solitary (fortunate) point from nine means there’s a strong chance we’ll be in the bottom three before the opening credits of Jools Holland’s Hootenanny.
Relegation wasn’t an inevitability after that West Ham game - we still had time to get the key decisions right if we wanted to avoid a trip to the New York Stadium the following year. Instead we appointed Paul Lambert.
We now find ourselves at a similar crossroads.
Is there any hope for Narcis Pelach?
It’s impossible to bury my head in the sand about the Head Coach any longer. Believe me I’ve tried. I so wanted to buy into all that stuff in the brochure. A bright, inventive, meticulous young coach, highly regarded in the game, loved by his players. I really wanted to believe this was our Kieran McKenna.
The hope was that this might be a table-setting season, similar to Daniel Farke’s start at Norwich, where the green shoots were visible and simply needed nurturing? There was the promise of the Cannon-Gallagher partnership, the emergence of Seko, the fast starts and capacity to dig deep and fight back in some of those early games. At times there was slick, quick, one-touch interplay in the final third that just needed knitting together a bit more consistently. They were only glimpses in games more often than not, and wins were scarce, the spaces we left were vast and we were ceding a frightening number of shots on goal, but it still seemed like there might be something to work with.
Yet instead of developing those foundations little by little, they have crumbled to ash. The midfield is lightweight. Those attacking instincts have disappeared, sacrificed in the name of a low block which isn’t actually stopping teams from creating chances. The fightbacks have been replaced by throwing winning positions away and conceding late winners, the hallmark of doomed sides.
As has been painstakingly detailed recently, we are one of the worst teams in the Championship by almost every metric. It’s no longer clear what Pelach is trying to achieve. The belief in him and each other seems to have drained from the players.
Might his original ‘vision’ be renewed if Lee Darnbrough can provide him with the muscularity and experience we’re aching for? It’s possible, but the Head Coach himself has been part of the problem, constantly returning to tactics that aren’t working, his attempts at game management becoming stranger and stranger. We’re pretty much in vote of no-confidence territory.
So who then?
Perhaps the best argument for retaining NP is that the prospect of yet another rebuild is just so tough to stomach. If Pelach does depart, however, we have to make sure the Director of Football structure works as it’s supposed to. Forget any notion of ditching it altogether and going back to the old ‘manager as emperor’ one - those days aren’t coming back, and clinging to them for so long is in large part how we got into this mess in the first place.
What’s needed is a Head Coach whose playing style and values are a good fit for the squad he’s inheriting. This is a group that, over the past two summers, has largely been constructed for managers professing to want to play 4-3-3 with high-intensity pressing. Walters has already failed this test once by appointing a HC who immediately switched to 4-4-2 and has become preoccupied with a low block.
Things might still be salvageable if we can play to the strengths of our better players. If he’s ready to return to management, as has been reported, we could do worse than turn to Tony Mowbray - an experienced, safe pair of hands who likes an attack-minded 4-2-3-1 that should work with what we have available.
Relegation celebration?
There’s a school of thought that a holiday in League One is actually what’s required, an opportunity for a good purge of the toxins, as Ipswich did and Birmingham are doing. Without competence and clarity of leadership and a proper direction however, that ‘holiday’ can quickly become rather a longer stay than intended, a miserable quagmire you can’t escape from.
And make no mistake about it - we do not have that leadership. We are reaping what was sewn by basing the single most important football-related appointment at the club purely on vibes. Would Jon Walters’ six-month stint at Fleetwood have netted him the gig had he not been a beloved former player and symbol of better days? It’s hard to imagine it would. If you squint you could just about make a case for it as a short-term fillip to unite team and supporters, a fist-pumping shot of adrenaline to get us over the line when we were in a similar pickle 12 months ago. To make the appointment permanent though was absolutely insane - this is no job for a rookie.
It’s arguably the worst yet in a string of appalling decisions by the owners that have left us in a state of permanent revolution, constantly ripping up and starting again and making it possible to establish an identity. We’re like a teenager at art college, a goth this week, an indie kid the next, an unfortunate mullet phase the week after that. We’re seeing the result of that, and there’s little indication anything is about to change.
To invoke Hudson (not Alan, but Private First Class William), we’re in some real pretty shit now.
Nailed it