Football / Fan's View
‘Rovers will comfortably finish second’
It will come as no surprise to Gasheads that Darrell Clarke has been named League Two manager of the month. The only surprise is that it took so long. Six wins in March – that’s the stuff of dreams and promotion chasing teams. What can possibly go wrong?
Expect from the media, and lots of fans, concerns about ‘the curse of the manager of the month award’. The story goes that as soon as a manager wins this coveted award, the form of the team goes to pot and soon the theory, the myth even, becomes fact.
I do not have enough time on my hands to find out whether there is anything in the theory, but I doubt it. I’d imagine it’s as scientific a theory as homeopathy.
is needed now More than ever
I have changed my mind so many times this season as to where the Rovers will finish this season, I would do well to just shut up, but I suspect my local B24/7 reader will demand some sort of opinion, so I’ll make another prediction: Rovers will finish second this season.
Winning the league may prove too tricky even for magic man Clarke, but I have the feeling, based on just a feeling, that the team will ‘get something’ at Northampton, that something being a win. It is not for nothing that Rovers are the form team and they will head for Northampton thoroughly bubbling with optimism and confidence.
Wael Al-Qadi must think this club ownership malarkey is a piece of cake. Whilst I am sure that neither he, nor new chairman Steve Hamer, would suggest that the performance of the team and the manager is directly down to them, their very presence has given the whole club a huge lift. And that belief goes right down to the terraces.
Rovers fans have waited a lifetime to be in a position where genuine progression on and off the pitch is a realistic aim.
To date, Messrs Al Qadi and Hamer have studiously avoided the lumpen clichés of previous regimes at the club and have told things like they are. None of Nick Higgs’ ‘things are going on behind the scenes’ or ‘without the board of directors there would be no Bristol Rovers’.
Even though the new kids in town have only been Gasheads for five minutes or so, they seem to have a far better level of understanding of the club than the failed and discredited old guard.
‘And now you’re gonna believe us,’ goes the old song, ‘the Gas are going up.’ I think they are too and I repeat that Bristol Rovers will comfortably finish second. Remember you read it here first, unless they finish third or worse, in which case you never read it at all.
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