The Beauty of Blackpool

I just love a manager with buckets of personality. Not to mention a manager who puts a winning team together on a shoestring budget. I’m not sure where this love of an overachieving Premiership underdog comes from. Perhaps it’s down to the fact that I’ve supported Liverpool FC in the Prem all my life, which has led me to cast an eye over smaller squads that punch above their weight.

In past years the Premier league has been lit up by teams like Reading or Hull. Squads that start the season by unexpectedly shooting to the top of the league, and maybe even qualifying for Europe like Ipswich Town did in 2000. Better still, you sometimes get a championship team reaching the final of one of England’s two cup competitions without having crazy amounts of dosh to splash about. Millwall FC and Cardiff City certainly merit a mention for reaching the FA Cup final in 2004 and 2010 respectively.

My personal favourite? Well, I’ll certainly never forget the days of Martin O’Neill at Filbert Street, when the canny Ulsterman led unfancied Leicester City to three league cup finals in four years, winning two of them and securing European qualification. Scalps claimed along the way to these finals included those of Manyoo and the Arse, sending the Foxes faithful into wonderland.

 

 

 

 

Fans of the game owe a great deal to these clubs that defy expectations; underdogs who get places which the Spurs and Man Citys of this world can only dream of despite the huge amounts of cash they pour into their squads. They inspire other ‘small’ teams to also try and create a squad that can go far. Underdogs also save neutrals from dying of boredom caused by the Manyoos and Chelskis of this world, and from giving up on the sport altogether due to an overdose of predictability.

The only ‘downside’ to loving these teams is the pain which inevitably follows. Their limited finances mean that they can rarely keep up with early expectations, generally getting relegated within a season or two. Yet this does not make their achievements in vain. Their lofty exploits live long in the memory of a club’s supporters, creating a benchmark to which all future generations at the club can aspire to, and are the stuff of tall tales which parents can recount to their children by the fire (or wherever it is that parents spend time with their kids these days.)

This year a result which caught the eye in the opening week of the Premiership was Blackpool’s trashing of Wigan. Most pundits might smirk at the mention of the Tangerines, considering them as little more than a passing joke. Yet true students of the game (probably of the more silver-haired variety) will argue that Blackpool FC was not always perceived as a small club in English football. Indeed some geezers might even recall the shockwaves caused in 1938 when Sir Stanley Matthews dared to request a transfer to Blackpool FC from Stoke City FC. This occurred in a time when footballers were expected to be loyal to their club and its fans for life.
 

 

Matthews’s autobiography 'The Way It Was' is a heart-warming account of the days when an England player had to answer to the FA if he spent his allowance on a cup-cake whilst on international duty overseas, without first seeking permission. Other gems in this book also include Matthews being told off for forgetting to clean the opposition’s dressing room when he was still a young trainee at Stoke. These would of course be the least of a professional footballer’s fears nowadays.

At that time there was no such thing as ‘big’ clubs and ‘small’ clubs and no huge financial gulf which exists between football teams today. Every team in the league fancied their chances of winning the competition. Nowadays coming fourth and qualifying for the European Champions League is considered a phenomenal achievement, which makes you wonder if the quality of domestic competitions is actually improving or regressing. All of this makes unfancied heroes like Blackpool FC so crucial in an increasingly predictable European game, riddled with agents and dominated by a clutch of big clubs.

Post-Matthews, the Blackpool faithful finally have a new messiah in top flight football who goes by the name of Ian Holloway. Lovingly known as 'Ollie', this glib & charismatic specimen took up the reins in 2009 & masterminded an incredible promotion to the Premier league in 2010 via a playoff victory. After this dramatic triumph, Ollie said he turned his phone off when taking a two day summer holiday with his wife, only to find 762 messages when he turned it back on, with just two of them being sent from people he knew!  

 

 

The number of agents trying to contact Ollie might have dwindled when Blackpool FC declared that they would be putting in place a wage ceiling of 10,000 pounds a week. What this means is that Ollie might lose players to lower league sides like Southampton that have bigger budgets than he does! All of which made the sight of Blackpool topping the Premier league on the opening day of the Premiership season all the more psychedelic. Their incredible 4-0 victory at Wigan must have the followers of the Tangerines in nirvana.  Come the end of the 2010-2011 season, Blackpool might be hanging onto their Premiership lives by the skin of their teeth, yet the current standings bring to mind a time when every single team in the top flight was ‘in it to win it’ and not just to ‘win fourth place’ or ‘beat the drop’. 

The greatest weapon Blackpool have at their disposal is that they enter every game without any pressure whatsoever. They had hardly just won the playoff earlier this year when Ollie said in a post-match interview that ‘nothing is worse than the Premier league in my opinion’ before entering into an impassioned and typically off the wall soliloquy about the gulf in finances available to clubs today which is somewhat representative of the problems faced by modern day societies in the developed world. 

All of which already makes Blackpool a gust - or rather a blast - of fresh air in the Premier league. Their Bristolian manager’s streetwise and frank demeanor makes him the heir of Jose Mourinho, at least when it comes to press conferences. However his tactical nous is not to be sniffed at either. Since Ollie began his reign Blackpool have developed a neat passing game and he has also shown an ability to dip into the transfer market to acquire valid additions like Frenchman Eliot Grandin.

 

His ability to get the best out of an underachieving side whilst implementing a winning brand of football gives Blackpool and all neutrals hope that this is a manager who can help his side play to the maximum of their strengths whilst keeping their feet firmly planted to the ground. 


Ollie for England anyone?