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Meet the tiny straw I cling to. Not much of a straw, granted. But it’s my straw…

11th June 2009 By Kevin Baldwin Leave a Comment

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A month on from the Valley of Death, the search for solace continues.

Even a tiny bit of solace. A quantum of solace, in fact.

(My physique has been compared to that of the current James Bond, I'll have you know. Admittedly, the comparison took the form of 'You're no Daniel Craig, are you?')

But the crumbs of comfort on offer are, well, pretty crummy.

We won't have to endure trips to Portman Road or Selhurst Park in the league next season � though the club's now gone and arranged a pre-season friendly at Palace. (I wouldn't have thought a game at a bogey ground was the best way to build confidence, but I expect those responsible know what they're doing�)

We will be playing at Brentford, which is just a short journey away on the 65 bus � though this benefit will only be enjoyed by me and a couple of other Canaries in this part of SW London.

There's the season ticket rebate � though I'm waiving mine. (My reason: given that we're all desperate for someone to come along and put their money into the club, it seems contradictory to take out money I'd already budgeted to give them.)

'At least we'll win a few more games next season,' I've heard some people say � though I think we should wait and see what the squad looks like in August before indulging in such wild speculation.

However� there is one thought which, I've found, has taken the edge off the pain of our plight.

I should warn you that it's not a jolly line of thinking, and it does come with a degree of risk; follow it too far and you end up in a very gloomy place.

Still here? OK, here it is:

Life close to the point of the football pyramid is largely pointless.

This is not the conventional view, of course � and certainly not one which the FA or Sky would want to become widespread. We are supposed to see the Premier League as the Promised Land, as the only place to be. But is it?

Questioning the point of being a Premier League side sounds daft at first, I know. That's what I thought when I overheard a Bristol City fan talking on his mobile on the train back to London after they and Andy d'Urso beat us at Carrow Road in February.

�That's six wins and a draw in seven games now,� he told his mate. �Carry this on and we'll make the play-offs. Obviously we don't want to go up, but it would be good to get in the play-offs again.�

That's ridiculous, I thought. If they made the play-offs, would he really go along to those games hoping they would lose? Of course not. And yet I could sort of see what he meant.

Promotion to the Premier League generally means a grim struggle against relegation to start with. I was going to call it a joyless struggle, but that wouldn't be true; the survival celebrations at Hull and Stoke last season (and at West Brom in 2005) show that.

But all the time, you're looking down at the trapdoor below � and we all know what that feels like.

If you manage to survive, the aim is then to become a solid mid-table team like Bolton, Blackburn or Wigan. That's the next step for the likes of Hull and Stoke.

But it seems to me that the blueprint for doing so is to become a dour, efficient points-gathering machine; to be hard to beat (often with a defensive 4-5-1) without worrying a lot about providing entertainment.

Such clubs don't really do anything apart from stay where they are. They just want to keep the Premier League money coming in to be able to afford the players to help them stay where they are to keep the money coming in to be able to� oh, you get the point.

People at the club get rich, but the club doesn't achieve much. True, the fans get to see the best players in the country � but they're usually on the other side, and the aim is to stop them playing.

Of course, you might make it into Europe � but that isn't what it was in our day. Steve Coppell famously declared that he would field a team of reserves if Reading ever qualified � and though he never got the chance to prove it, Messrs Megson and O'Neill have done just that at advanced stages of the competition.

In April, Harry Redknapp described Europe as 'a distraction'.

You can see their point. Since we played in it, the UEFA Cup has become a bloated, devalued affair with poorer-quality teams taking part.

Allowing eliminated teams from the Champions League to join halfway through was plain ludicrous. And next season, it becomes an even more bloated entity called the Europa League.

The point I'm trying to make is: if the place we're trying to get to isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's marginally easier to bear if we slip further away from it.

The risk I mentioned earlier is: if you take the thought that the Premier League is pointless to its logical conclusion, you could conclude that there's no reason to follow football at all. But the enjoyment of individual games and the striving for short-term goals usually push this thought to one side.

It's like life, really. In around six billion years, the sun will die and the whole of human existence will be rendered utterly inconsequential (if a collision with Venus or Mars hasn't already wiped us out). If we thought about that too much, we'd never bother to do anything � so we block it out and concentrate on the here and now, day by day.

In football, we block out the fact that (the Big Four excepted) Premier League teams have little to play for other than survival and carry on anyway, taking it (as per the old clich�) one game at a time.

You might also infer that my way of thinking indicates a lack of ambition, and that I'd be happy if I ended up watching City in the Blue Square Premier.

But no � well, not entirely. I want us to make progress as much as anyone, and I certainly wouldn't be happy if we fell any further. But yes, I'd still be at Ebbsfleet and Histon.

Look, I'm well aware that it's easy to pick holes in my argument. And there's an inviting comment box below for you to do just that.

But though the argument may be constructed of straw, I'm finding that clutching those straws is working for me at the moment.

And in a situation like ours, you use whatever works to make it easier.


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Filed Under: Column, Kevin Baldwin

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