Watching your team fall apart

Chesterfield are facing relegation and a Chairman turning down bids for the club and nesh players who won't battle

Gary Caldwell says he doesn’t want to hear any negativity from fans after a 4-0 home drubbing, but for many it was difficult to find any positives on Saturday, he said he can’t accept the performance and neither can we fans and that’s fair comment. The criticism for his own team when interviewed was harsh, once we gifted Oxford the first goal the manager said that the team “Self destructed…no resilience and no character, no desire, no willingness to fight and stand up for yourself “ are fairly damning words.

The manager refused to comment on why Dan Jones was subbed in the first half, which could be taken to mean that he defender wasn’t following instructions properly.

For the first 20 minutes it looked as though Chesterfield had turned a corner and were building on the admirable point gained at Millwall, but watching the goals replayed on Saturday night must have been a horror epic for many..

If Gary doesn’t want negative comments he’d better not go on facebook where a selection of comments read “We can’t play with 3 at the back” “Shocking display;”  “I’m done for this year and no renewal of my season ticket;”  and “Is this for real?” were some of the printable ones.

https://twitter.com/brown29_/status/833043960536920067

Even more galling was that after the defeat against Bury, on loan midfielder Reece Brown went on twitter to publish a picture of his bruised head where he’d been kicked with the comment “Reasons why I don’t head the ball.” Which didn’t meet with a favourable reaction from the paying public. When will players realise that anything you publish on line just won’t get deleted, and even if it was meant to be taken with a sense of humour, it wont be?

Reaction from fans were predictable

"I've had bigger scratches on my cock"

"Good luck in your career outside football"

"Grow a pair of bollocks then"

personally I hope we never select him again for the rest of his loan period with the club

Off the field Chesterfield FC is in interesting times, many of us were flabbergasted to read a posting on Monday from a Chesterfield fan based in Stockholm who said that he was linked to a consortium who wanted to buy Chesterfield FC for a reported sum of £10 million. The poster said that the business people would have paid in £3m initially and then paid in other monies in terms of sponsorship over time which would have added up to £10m. Dave Allen was reported to have rejected the bid out of hand. The club then revealed that enquiries had taken place in January.

I'd suspect that Dave Allen would be looking for an outright deal rather than something in installments. His valuation of £15m was not met, but with the team about to go to League 2, it's less and less likely that anyone would buy the club.

This lead many fans to question why it wasn’t made public at the time, although people must temper their enthusiasm over “bids” which may or may not be as attractive as they are reported. We all remember the initial enthusiasm that greeted one Darren Brown; and no one would want a repeat of that situation. 

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Normal Service Resumed

For 80 minutes it looked as though Gary Caldwell could get his fist win as Chesterfield Manager v Bury, then it all went wrong late in the game, again.

According to most fans, that, appears to be game over. Chesterfield 7 points from safety, with a terrible goal difference having just had a disastrous series of results in a 4 match “relegation mini league” One hard won point against Gillingham but losses against Oldham, Northampton, and now Bury, leave the Spireites requiring snookers.

In all those matches there were periods where we were on top and could have got a better result , but we have to face facts and realise that the team isn’t good enough and hasn’t played consistently well for 90 minutes in any match this season. In reality we need 8 wins from 14 games to be safe and since our longest winning streak all season has been 2 league victories on the trot, most of us can’t see that happening.

It was a game of 2 halves against Bury, they didn’t produce much first half and we got the goal. But, what a second half. Dependant on your viewpoint we either sat back and invited pressure or simply weren’t good enough. The return of Ebanks-Blake raised a few eyebrows, but Ched Evans out injured, Gary Caldwell had few other options and to be fair, the out of favour striker played well and set up the goal. Kristian Dennis who scored, says the players haven’t given up hope, but looking on message boards there are few fans who think we will stay up.

We’ve had 2 managers this season and amazingly we were actually top of the league on Tuesday the 16^th August. However no league wins between 17^th September and 22^nd November really saw a dramatic fall from grace, which the club has never recovered from.

It’s amazing as a fan, how you can grasp at straws in the face of reality. Before the game on 5 Live I was listening to a football fan on 5 live, who had been to all 92 grounds and when asked where the best pies were, in his opinion he said they were at the Proact stadium. Clearly this was a good omen? When our new German keeper saved the penalty, I thought it had to be our day, surely we’d be able to kick the ball down Sheffield Road for 10 minutes and then fall over like John Sheridan’s Oldham Athletic to seal the points? As it was it ended in a way Thorsten Stuckmann would rather forget.

Away days are now a drinking session interrupted by a football match for many with more talk of which pubs to visit, rather than the hope of any victories, for many of us the only concern is that we don’t finish rock bottom below Coventry.

Relegation blues

They say the truth hurts and it’s hard to disagree with the post match summary from BBC Radio Northampton, who described Chesterfield as one of the worst teams they have played this season.

Two losses against fellow strugglers on successive Saturdays means that the number of teams we could potentially catch diminishes with every negative result.

The BBC pundits identified our goal scoring record, especially away from home, as the main source of Chesterfield’s trouble. Less than a goal a game means the chances of getting the 7 or 8 wins required to stay up are becoming faint hopes

Mathematically, of course, we could get out of the mire but unless the performances on the pitch or the tactics change, it’s hard to see who else we could beat. Gary Caldwell says we handed the points to Northampton, but it’s really little consolation to those of us who spent our disposable income to watch defenders who can’t attack the ball and defend a cross.

The Blues won some praise from the local press for trying to play the game the right way using attacking wing backs to spread out the play against Northampton, but very few dangerous balls were sent in from the flanks and much of our possession was in our own half.

Once we scored, by the simple tactic of a midfielder running straight at the home defence, Northampton got the jitters, credit to the fans, for singing ironically “We’re gonna win 4-3”

A decent following, for a team in trouble.

Conversely Oldham won again and are now out of the bottom 4 our old manager John Sheridan has got them scrapping and winning ugly.

Off the field many are actually praising the quiet-ish revolution that has taken place under Ashley Carson. The announcement that financially the club is living a hand to mouth existence, but will not go bust, isn’t one that many wanted to hear but it’s a message that had to be said. It appears that since the Development Centre shambles, Ashley Carson has fully taken over the running of the club.

It’s a fairly logical appointment, since he’s a businessman, and perhaps he’s got a little more capability in these matters than others who have had been entrusted with various aspects of the marketing and finances of the operation. 

Ashley seems quite happy to communicate with the fans, which in itself is quite revolutionary. This week the club has a said goodbye to Richard Nichols in the commercial department as the club need to change the way things are working. 

Many fans have looked at the balance sheet and expressed concern at the wages being paid to staff at the club and have pinpointed this as a cost saving area.

On lighter note a fan requested Cheese and Onion pies at the Proact and his request has been granted.

Having suffered at the hands of stadium catering selling some form of meat in pies at grounds in up and down the country perhaps the vegetarian option is the way forward

Well the Game against Oldham didn’t quite finish as well as I’d hoped, losing a relegation six pointer, 0-1, against 10 men doesn’t exactly fill the fans with the joys of spring.

Making my way to the stadium I was reminded of JB Priestley’s comment that “I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere”

It started looking like a new dawn, Ashley Carson on facebook hoping for a day of attacking football, 5 new players in over the transfer window and Gboly Ariyibi departing.

The fee for Ariyibi is reported to be in the region of £300,000, at the start of the season Chesterfield rejected a bid from Brentford that was slightly higher but Gboly’s form had dipped and he’d actually played himself out of a bigger move. The mercurial wide man is always a source of frustration to fans and mangers alike, if you can turn the full back inside out, why is it so difficult to deliver a decent cross?

Sadiq El Fitouri, is one of our new signings, he is the lad who appeared on the Class of 92 documentary about Salford City FC. He looked a threat every time he went forward in the first half and it looked as though we were certain to score, if only Dan Jones, back after a long term injury, hadn’t missed his kick.

Post match Jones commented that Gary Caldwell told the lads, it would be harder against 10 men and so it proved, once again, as in the Wimbledon match we could not really test the keeper, because the final ball wasn’t there against a packed defence. Caldwell says we need to take the handbrake off when attacking and the strikers have to hold the ball up more and be more aggressive.

Aggression is one thing that Oldham don’t lack, Anthony Gerrard got himself sent off for a headbutt in the tunnel going into half time, he was “at it“ with Ian Evatt for the whole of the first half. Ok they time wasted, but that’s to be expected, anyone would do that if you’re a man down for half the match.

Credit to the Oldham fans, they expected to take a beating but got behind their team for the whole second half, more than can be said for our end. One Oldham supporter wasn’t even wearing a shirt, poverty is a terrible thing, perhaps their club could have gone to Poundland and bought him a new wardrobe? Seriously though, I’m getting sick of supporters running on the pitch at the Proact and maybe it’s time to put up a small barrier to stop it happening in future? 

The 2 teams put up a good show of passing football in the first half, neither of them looked like relegation fodder on this display , however if you've spent he first half of the season being awful, you have a mountain to climb. 

Chesterfield have improved since away losses at Rochdale and Port Vale had us described as "relegation certainties" by other fans.

Oldham leapfrogged us in the table, it looks like they might have a another "Shezzurection" on their hands. we must get points from all our next 4 games, as they are against other teams in the bottom half. 

It's going to go to the wire and I don't fancy our last couple of fixtures

in the press box