Last week the West Bromwich Albion striker Kevin Campbell spoke of his hope that the Baggies would soon ”shake off the yo-yo club tag”. Wise words indeed, but then the big centre-forward has been around long enough to know that in football if you don’t shake off a tag, it can quickly become a millstone round your neck.
While West Brom might want to shake off the yo-yo club tag, their Midlands neighbours Wolves aspire to it. They have spent years trying to shake off the far more onerous ”sleeping giant” tag. In football, giants are generally slumberous. Occasionally you come across a true giant of the game, but that generally means he has just died. This is much like sleeping, but with the added bonus that the kids won’t wake you up by jumping up and down on your chest and demanding to know why you didn’t buy any Coco Pops.
Sometimes, of course, a wakeful giant is slain, generally by an underdog or a minnow who brings him down to earth with a bump using a banana skin, but that is a different matter altogether.
If Wolves could shake off the sleeping-giant tag, Leeds would surely be delighted to pounce on it in the hope of shaking off the ”crisis club” tag. Sadly this seems unlikely as Elland Road’s downward spiral has become a vicious circle, which makes it almost impossible for them to turn the corner without running into more trouble.
Bryan Robson must take a lot of the credit for putting Albion into a position from which they can begin to talk of shaking off tags. When the job at The Hawthorns came up, many felt Robson wasn’t in with a shout of getting the nod to be in the frame because of the baggage he was carrying. He had picked up the baggage while riding on an emotional roller coaster at Middlesbrough (who themselves only recently shook off the yo-yo club tag by ending a hoodoo and establishing themselves as a fixture). As Robson would be the first to admit, his time at the Riverside was a steep learning curve that eventually went pear-shaped.
In many ways baggage is even worse than a tag. Though of course sometimes baggage comes with a tag. And more often than not if you open the baggage you will find it contains a bit of previous and some old doubts that will probably resurface if he doesn’t keep his head on straight. Unlike a tag you can’t shake baggage off. In the case of some players this is not totally a bad thing, because if you took away his baggage you would be taking away 75% of his game. In this instance what the manager has to do is retain the baggage, but get the player to put it in a place where the referee won’t keep tripping over it.
Football management is about dealing with those kinds of conflicting demands. In football you must be solid and fluid. You must be consistent but not predictable. You must keep your shape but not be rigid. This defies all the laws of logic, physics and human nature, which makes coaching a team more or less impossible unless you are a total one-off, a genuine character or were a great thinker about the game even when you were a player.
Since Robson returned to The Hawthorns he has silenced the knockers who otherwise might have jumped on the bandwagon until the wheels came off.
Cunningly, though, he has not silenced the crowd. This was vital. At this stage of the season the team needs a full house to become a 12th man by really getting behind them. The players can play with freedom with the crowd behind them. Because when the crowd is behind them they know it will not get on their backs.
A team with a crowd on their backs is even more handicapped than those that are carrying baggage or trying to shake off a tag. And the crowd only get on the players’ backs after something has silenced them. In many ways the crowd at a football match is like a World War II doodlebug — it’s when it stops making a noise that those on the ground should panic.
As Robson knows from his time on Teesside, football fans have short memories. They are also always harking back to the glory days. Because of their short memories this is often as long as seven days ago. That is why in football you are only as good as your last result.
If West Brom do shake off the yo-yo club tag they will need to move up to the next level. For inspiration they can look to Charlton Athletic. Charlton have been a yo-yo club and a crisis club and probably would have been sleeping giants too if they’d come from a hotbed of soccer. Nowadays, though, the Robins are a beacon that other teams can use as a template. Bolton Wanderers might have been a template too, but when they made Big Sam Allardyce they threw away the mould.
Whatever happens to Albion, the fact they are still there or thereabouts in the tag-shaking-off zone should ensure that, should the worst happen, nobody will be pointing the finger, though in all probability several people will have to take a long look at themselves and hold their hands up. — Â