How long, Is this thing going on? Blackburn report

This is grim. I keep trying to think of ways in which the distance from here to the summer will seem shorter. But no matter what I do – this is February, the season ends in May. There is a lot of fun to be had. Like with last time, you do wonder how much long term damage is being done. Short long term in that the players become less confident. We do have some canny players for the Championship. If we’d never come up to the Prem and you were looking at a Championship season with this lot, you might not be feeling too bad. But this experience must be scarring them. Longer long term, we are doing yet more damage to our supporter base. What sort of people want to come and watch this week in, week out? And do we want people like us supporting the football club? I also think it is damaging me personally. Defeats always upset me – but it was a short term pain that most times I could get over by the end of Saturday night. But this constant week in, week out dreadfulness is dragging me down. Every time I manage to lift myself back up, I feel as if I’m not standing quite as tall as I was before. Even the minor “highs”, like a last minute scrambled equaliser at home to Spurs, are so pathetic that with hindsight you feel a little ashamed as to how pleased you were.

Mick went back to the 4-5-1 he’d tried several times earlier on in the season. I suppose with Kyle up front instead of Stead and Elliott not being wasted by being played wide right, in theory it shouldn’t have been as bad. It was. Mick said afterwards that it was a game of two halves. Well I suppose so, in a strict technical sense every game is unless it is abandoned. But other than that I can’t see what he was getting at. From the off Blackburn were murdering us and we were lucky to survive the first 20 minutes goalless. Like almost all Premiership teams however, Blackburn are crap and so their efforts started to wane. If you want to, you can say we got more into it – if you do you probably believe the moon gets brighter at night. We even had a couple of efforts on goal. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a couple of strikers.

Inevitably Bellamy scored. The ball came in from somewhere. I forget where – but even so I have better knowledge of the incident than Davis. With Breen doing his best to make Davis’s job harder without actually providing any defensive cover, Davis parried it into the most dangerous area. Bellamy was there and for a competent finisher it wasn’t a difficult conversion.

Second half, the ball came looping into our box, offering no danger. Davis could easily have had it if he had been prepared to come only slightly off his line. Collins was unnecessarily worried that Davis might do so, so he wandered into the six yard area. His positioning was quite superb. He was nowhere near the ball, was not marking Bellamy but was managing to obstruct Davis. There must have been one square inch in the centre of the six yard box where he could achieve all three simultaneously and yet he managed to do it. Bellamy headed into an open net (i.e one guarded by Davis and Collins).

We did nowt after that. Some players went off and some others came on. I couldn’t give a stuff. A couple of lads a few rows in front of us started fighting. One of them was pretty good. Nice fast fist work and light on his feet. Needs to learn how to use a hook occasionally though as he’ll never get enough power to get his man down just with jabs.

So I got home to find that our Birmingham tickets had arrived. Why do we keep going? I can only see it as an investment. Keep going through all of this and the highs (always a relative thing – but then all highs, by definition, are) seem even higher. I know it is bollocks, but don’t let me know – I’m trying to fool myself.