A Season of Unfortunate Events

You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief across south Bristol at half-past-two on Saturday afternoon, as referee James Linington drew an end to one of the most disappointing and frustrating seasons in recent Bristol City history.

Awful because we haven’t been able to go to games. Awful because of the never-ending stream of injuries, serious injuries, repeat injuries. Awful because of the inability to take enough shots on goal. Awful for the basic inability to pass the ball which has blighted our performances throughout the season. Awful for the apparent lack of care from a number of senior professionals in the last third of the season.

Despite their constant references to fans being missed, I suspect there is a fairly significant contingent of players, staff and directors at Ashton Gate saying a little prayer of thanks that fans haven’t been allowed in during these last few months. The atmosphere would have fluctuated from frustration to anger to sheer vitriol, certainly until the permanent appointment of Nigel Pearson.

I suspect that by yesterday, and certainly by the final whistle, many fans would have taken their lead from some of the squad and simply given up caring. Perhaps, in a way, it was good that Louis Britton’s debut goal was in front of an empty stadium. At least he knew that would be the case when he stepped onto the pitch, whereas it may have been more of shame if it had been scored in front of the hardy few thousand who’d have still been enduring the agony by the 87^th minute of the final match of a desperately disappointing season.

It isn’t just about bad results, as many are quick to point out. Any team can have a bad run and struggle and someone has to finish in the bottom six. The stats speak for themselves, though, in terms of how performances have been.

Most home league defeats in a season – 13 beating the dire attempts of our last relegation squad by two. 

Fewest number of home goals scored, ever. Just 18 in 23 games and a failure to hit the net in 11 – nearly half – of the 23 matches.

At just 360 shots across the season, we were a full 82 worse off than any other team in the division and 49 worse than the previous worst ever performers in Championship history. (thanks to @BS3Rob for those stats).

Our possession stats are as you’d expect, amongst the worst in the division. If the team was playing a counter-attacking style then possession might not be a problem, but according to whoscored.com we scored just one goal that classifies as a counter-attack all season (perhaps Wells at Middlesbrough?).

If you were flinging in loads of crosses too then they’re more likely to be inaccurate, so is that an excuse? No, we averaged two fewer crosses per game than the next lowest contributor in the division.

We scored just one penalty, mainly because we didn’t attack enough to earn any more. No team scored fewer set-piece goals, and we were 20% worse than any other team in the league at conceding from them, with 23 goals coming in that manner.

But enough of the stats, they simply back up what we all knew watching from our living-rooms, but some of them are especially telling.

In asking what went so wrong I think most would agree you have to go back in time a little and I’ve banged on long enough that we haven’t adequately replaced the players that we’ve sold, as understandable as those decisions usually were. We’ve been letting goal-scorers leave for three seasons and I can’t think of a single replacement who has equalled their predecessor. Even Adam Webster, who replaced Aden Flint so superbly defensively, and Jay Dasilva who impressed so much on loan, don’t contribute in front of goal like Flint and Joe Bryan did. Andi Weimann has worked his socks off in replacing Bobby Reid, but he’s not as clever a footballer at linking up with other players and doesn’t score as many goals. Add in the strikes Josh Brownhill could magic out of nowhere and that’s a significant number of goals – and arguably attacking skill and vigour – that just haven’t been replaced.

Many of those names, with the addition of Marlon Pack and Korey Smith, also fall into the leadership bracket and that is undoubtedly an area we’ve struggled with for the last 18 months. We’ve got a very experienced dressing-room now – more on that later – but for whatever reason we don’t seem to have the same spirit and attitude you’d expect from a room full of leaders. I could talk about this for a long time, but an excellent recent piece in Bristol Live recently covered all my main points and summed it up exactly as I would.

And tying those two elements together, we come to the first week of the 2019-20 season where we lost 3-1 to Marco Bielsa’s impressive Champions-elect Leeds, having just sold Adam Webster to not replace him at all. Following that game we shipped out the reliable and always-fit Pack, as well as Jamie Paterson – another dressing room character and one of our few occasional creative forces, appeared to shake the very plan we were trying to build to its core. We’d lost our two best passers and probably our most skilful player in a week, and whilst Lee Johnson somehow got that side consistently in the top six for the first half of the season, performances had become gritty and uninspiring if entertaining football is what you’re after, with regular 1-0 wins away from home maintaining our lofty position. With the combination of captain Brownhill’s sale in January, Johnson’s ever more defensive tactics and fraying temper, followed by the break for COVID, warning signs were starting to show.

Dean Holden was quite clearly the wrong appointment at the wrong time. Was it a head coach for the departing empire-building CEO to more easily control? Or a COVID finance-related gamble to keep things steady that simply didn’t work out? Potentially it was a mixture of both, but whatever the reasons it was a highly questionable decision that was quickly proven to be the wrong one – despite the now infamous first four games of the season being the main reason we’ve escaped another Championship relegation – for now.

Over the last three seasons we’ve signed a very large number of players who, put quite simply, haven’t been good enough. Jack Hunt, Tommy Rowe (although to be fair to him he was a league one midfielder who’s been played almost entirely at left-back), Adam Nagy, Sammie Szmodics, Kasey Palmer, Nakhi Wells – Tomas Kalas and Jay Dasilva even – haven’t brought what you’d expect to the side often enough.

Han-Noah Massengo has been in and out and showed some flashes of form, notably at the very start of his City career and more recently, but hasn’t been consistent enough to hold down a place. Chris Martin showed a few bright signs but was already fading before the standard season-ending injury did for him. Ashley Williams, Chris Brunt, Mariappa and Lansbury and probably more I’ve missed have been short-term signings – some of whom have done OK at best – but clearly haven’t brought the consistency or leadership you’d expect for an ‘old hand’. Personally, I would say the only permanent signings who have been an unarguable success amongst more than two dozen players brought in across the last three seasons are Daniel Bentley and Adam Webster. That’s way WAY off what’s required for a recruitment team, whoever is responsible.

As a team far too many passes go astray right the pitch, our crossing this year has been diabolical in the main (yes, you can raise me a Niclas Eliasson), and our lack of commitment in the last couple of months is galling as a fan. We don’t have enough controlled aggression to stop attacks in midfield, we don’t hold the ball up well enough up top when we do get hold of it. We don’t have wingers full stop, and certainly none who are pacy, who can dribble and cross, we don’t have creative players in the middle who can unpick a defence and, as alluded to earlier, we don’t have enough pace to be an effective counter-attacking team. Quite what our style and identity is, I certainly haven’t got a single clue.

But what about the injuries, I hear you say. And yes, there is little doubt that a team that could field the likes of Jay Dasilva, Alfie Mawson, Joe Williams, Liam Walsh, Andi Weimann, Jamie Paterson, Callum O’Dowda and Chris Martin for 80% of the season would surely not have struggled as badly as this team has. But even them I refer back to the backs-to-the-wall away wins which were maintaining our position early on – at Forest Dan Bentley was by far the outstanding player, at Cardiff we had one shot and then held on, at Huddersfield we produced a brilliant last 20 minutes to turn around a game we had been poor in.

Yes, it was a bit of a season of two halves, in terms of results at least. I personally never felt we were in scintillating form or felt it was maintainable. I went on record on the One Stream in Bristol podcast in December, when we were comfortably still in the top 8, to suggest we had been in a false position for nearly a year from what I was seeing. The stats and analysis suggested as such and performances since then have, unfortunately, backed that up.

Who knows what would have happened had we had fewer injuries – and God knows what’s been going on there – but we’ll never know and can only review what is in front of us.

So, what next? Nigel Pearson has come in to almost universal approval but he has a mammoth job ahead. Whatever ability may lay on the treatment table, we’re a club and a squad on a downward trajectory right now and that’s never easy to turn around. A big summer clearout may be welcomed by many, but you’ve got to replace players well – something we’ve not been good at as suggested above. Without knowing all the details, with Mark Ashton’s departure, no Director of Football or active Head of Recruitment currently in place, you suspect much of the summer activity will be around players Pearson, and maybe to a lesser extent Paul Simpson and Keith Downing, know of already.

We’ve got a Catch-22 situation where we clearly need to sign some players with leadership abilities, but also mustn’t get caught only signing more players who are over 30, as per the strong recent trend. Pearson will have an idea now which of the extensive range of youngsters – from Zak Vyner downwards – he wants to have around, but you suspect many will end up going out on loan. Personally, I’d like a move back towards signing 21-25 year olds with a sell-on value, a transfer policy that served us very well for a few years before being seemingly abandoned recently - but that may be tricky without paying transfer fees we probably can't afford. The echoes of 2012/13 are very real in terms of the types of players signed and the downwards momentum. The difference with now, from then, is the man in charge has been there and done it many times over and has a track record many in the division would be envious of.

It’s been almost amusing to see the smile on Nige’s face when asked about the fan reaction because he genuinely can’t believe he’s not being slated, given recent performances and results. Given the lack of organisation and fight the team has shown recently, there has to be a large cloud of doubt in most fans minds as to whether he can turn things around, but I suspect the general view is that if he can’t, who can?

There seems to be an underlying prevailing view that Steve Lansdown handed the keys to the football side of things to his outgoing CEO and put his total trust in him, and isn’t too impressed with some of the elements reported back to him in his meeting with the new boss. Andy Rolls’ departure was no coincidence, and not just because he’s ended up heading to Suffolk with his crony-employing director.

 There is a severe lack of structure and accountability in the club now Ashton has gone, with him having swept out a handful of key roles in becoming the autocratic boss. Despite a swathe of players being out of contract, it’s going to be an expensive summer for Lansdown Snr – again – as he needs to rebuild not only the playing side, but plug some senior roles in the administration and backroom staff too.

A quick word on Famara Diedhiou, who is seemingly set to depart BS3. He’s a player who has divided opinion throughout his stay at Ashton Gate, but I think has been appreciated by the majority, not least following his Player of the Season award last season. He has been our main focal point for four seasons and top scorer in most of them. He’s produced some outstanding displays, especially away from home, and despite an often poor first touch, is the player opposition fans and managers always talked about being the one to fear. He’s a great character too, and someone I and many others will miss.

But enough depression! To finish with a positive spin, we are staying in the Championship for a seventh consecutive season, which is our longest spell since the days of Alan Dicks.

We have a fantastic stadium that we’re all looking forward to returning to next August and a Premier League standard training facility (we’ll call it high performance when it starts producing them on the pitch).

We have a manager who seems to be the right character to toughen up the playing squad and, with significant additional support it has to be said – created the foundation of the Leicester team that not only won the Premier League, but has continued to push amongst the upper echelons of that division since.

We also have a handful of young players who have shown flashes of quality this year but, like all others, have struggled more recently. Whether the likes of Bakinson, Vyner, Semenyo and Massengo are good enough to cut it at this level will be proven this coming season. The tranche of younger guns may have to wait for their turn for a while longer and loans are likely for most – it will be a busy summer for Brian Tinnion but their Championship debuts should bump most up a division from where they may otherwise have ended up. Alex Scott in particular seems to be the one people are most excited about, and it would be fantastic if someone of that age could come through and establish themselves in the squad – we haven’t had too many under 20s do that in the last couple of decades.

And then there are maybe eight or nine more senior players who Pearson will be forced to use, with a COVID-depressed transfer market meaning the opportunity to make sales will be limited and interested clubs will struggle to cover the wages currently being paid out.

Player of the Season, Dan Bentley, is probably the most saleable and that, however unpalatable, will almost certainly be discussed as an option to help raise valuable funds to re-enforce other areas. Whether they’re your cup of tea or not, if the likes of Kalas (although the rumours surrounding events this week make that a doubt), Dasilva, Nagy, Joe Williams, O’Dowda, Weimann, Martin and Wells can be utilised and stay fit, Pearson will be leaning on them to provide a core that’s been missing in more ways than one for most of this season.

We all want results to improve, but we also want performances and enjoyment too and that’s been largely missing for two years in many fans’ eyes. Pearson has already hinted on a number of occasions he’s aware of the fans feeling on that front based on and will have seen enough to know it needs to change for the better. If he can produce a team that performs with more style, has more obvious structure, fights for each other, wins more at home and be a solid mid-table team, he’ll have done a pretty good job in my view. 

Not too much to ask. Is it?