Post by Carnster on Aug 20, 2016 11:18:42 GMT
I've been trying to constructively piece together my current thoughts on what the hell has happened to us this season. The last few weeks has seen us revert back into 'old' Salford.
Then I thought, 'Have we really been anything else but old Salford?'
As a Club, in my time supporting, which has spanned the Clubs worst stretch of success in its history (Just my luck to be born in 1975) the Club really hasn't changed its fortunes at all. A few successes here and there can be counted on one hand but the crux of the matter is that we have not really changed at all. We have moved home, improved our facilities, improved the squad, but not improved our fortunes. How can this be? Surely over the time period of my whole existence you'd be able to see credible progress. Wakey, Widnes, Hudds, both Hull's, Cas, Catalan, Wire. They've all made tangible progress over the same time period. Of course for parity, there are a few clubs that have gone worse than us. Bradford, London, Halifax. While I'm glad that we haven't gone the way of these clubs, we've just stayed at exactly the same level of mediocrity. I'm beginning to think that this level of mediocrity is actually our ceiling. We are incapable of taking that long road to progress that other teams seem to find easy to set in motion.
Now this isn't a knee-jerk reaction to the last few weeks, as rightly, if we'd not broke the rules we'd not be in our current situation and we'd have had our best season for a very long time. The controversy that follows the Club is part of this cycle that we can't break. We get a new owner who saves us from oblivion, but he brings his own baggage with him that continues this cycle. Dejected fans struggle to turn up, and understandably so, is part of the cycle. Money-grabbing players, idiot players, are part of the cycle. Unsettled players, poor choices in personnel behind the scenes, doing the easy things hard and not doing the hard things at all, is part of the cycle. This has literally been the story of Salford in my lifetime and continues to be so.
We now sit on the edge of SL oblivion.
Will we be a Club that can bounce back and build if the worst happens? Not a chance. While we can't break the cycle positively it's going to be all too easy to break the cycle negatively. That fall from SL will signal our end as a RL Club that can challenge the best. We may survive, even prosper in a lower league, but we'll never rise from that station once we arrive at it. The current financial climate, the current precarious state of the game in the UK as a whole means that there literally couldn't be a worse time for a SL Club to drop down. You couple this with an owner that will probably jump ship if it happens means we'll be lucky to even exist.
Now, we may get a grip and secure our survival yet, and I really hope we do. But it's another year of managing to just survive by the skin of our teeth, and that worries me. I genuinely believe that we have reached our peak as we are just unable to get everything working to make genuine progress over a sustained time. I really hope I'm proved wrong, but thirty-five years of the same mediocrity is hard to take and a decent indication that we're unlikely to make that transition like Wire, Widnes, and Cas have done.
My time as a Salford fan is being severely tested, and I'm not sure I like the feeling.
Then I thought, 'Have we really been anything else but old Salford?'
As a Club, in my time supporting, which has spanned the Clubs worst stretch of success in its history (Just my luck to be born in 1975) the Club really hasn't changed its fortunes at all. A few successes here and there can be counted on one hand but the crux of the matter is that we have not really changed at all. We have moved home, improved our facilities, improved the squad, but not improved our fortunes. How can this be? Surely over the time period of my whole existence you'd be able to see credible progress. Wakey, Widnes, Hudds, both Hull's, Cas, Catalan, Wire. They've all made tangible progress over the same time period. Of course for parity, there are a few clubs that have gone worse than us. Bradford, London, Halifax. While I'm glad that we haven't gone the way of these clubs, we've just stayed at exactly the same level of mediocrity. I'm beginning to think that this level of mediocrity is actually our ceiling. We are incapable of taking that long road to progress that other teams seem to find easy to set in motion.
Now this isn't a knee-jerk reaction to the last few weeks, as rightly, if we'd not broke the rules we'd not be in our current situation and we'd have had our best season for a very long time. The controversy that follows the Club is part of this cycle that we can't break. We get a new owner who saves us from oblivion, but he brings his own baggage with him that continues this cycle. Dejected fans struggle to turn up, and understandably so, is part of the cycle. Money-grabbing players, idiot players, are part of the cycle. Unsettled players, poor choices in personnel behind the scenes, doing the easy things hard and not doing the hard things at all, is part of the cycle. This has literally been the story of Salford in my lifetime and continues to be so.
We now sit on the edge of SL oblivion.
Will we be a Club that can bounce back and build if the worst happens? Not a chance. While we can't break the cycle positively it's going to be all too easy to break the cycle negatively. That fall from SL will signal our end as a RL Club that can challenge the best. We may survive, even prosper in a lower league, but we'll never rise from that station once we arrive at it. The current financial climate, the current precarious state of the game in the UK as a whole means that there literally couldn't be a worse time for a SL Club to drop down. You couple this with an owner that will probably jump ship if it happens means we'll be lucky to even exist.
Now, we may get a grip and secure our survival yet, and I really hope we do. But it's another year of managing to just survive by the skin of our teeth, and that worries me. I genuinely believe that we have reached our peak as we are just unable to get everything working to make genuine progress over a sustained time. I really hope I'm proved wrong, but thirty-five years of the same mediocrity is hard to take and a decent indication that we're unlikely to make that transition like Wire, Widnes, and Cas have done.
My time as a Salford fan is being severely tested, and I'm not sure I like the feeling.
