It has been a while since I’ve written anything on this blog, partially because i lost the motivation to do it, and partially because i wanted to focus more on the matches, rather than constantly looking to my notebook and jotting things down, i’m sure i’ll find a remedy to the latter and get back to writing match reports, which will obviously be for League 2 games for at least a year.
Anyway, back on topic. It’s been a pretty rough season for Carlisle, we suffered relegation, ending our 8 year run in the league. It’s sad, as you would have thought we’d have been closer to going up rather than down after all that time. I thought i would compile the few positives and the various negatives from the past season from my point of view, as many of my blogmates have been doing.
POSITIVES
Graham Kavanagh’s opening month and a half in charge
I’m not going to lie, when Greg Abbott was sacked, at the time, i was quite happy, i believed it to be the right decision and it probably still is. Kavanagh took caretaker charge and no Carlisle fan could complain with what happened, we won all 3 of the games that he managed in his caretaker role. The matches against Sheffield United, Stevenage and Notts County weren’t particularly pretty to watch, but at the end of the day we got the job done, 9 points, you can’t ask for more than that. When he took full control, i was skeptical, but willing to give him a chance. We proceeded to draw 2-2 against Shrewsbury, win on penalties against Morecambe in the JPT, lose 1-0 away to Oldham and win 1-0 away at MK Dons. This opening spell was satisfactory, nothing too much to complain about, and we were looking like we would dig ourselves out of trouble.
The performances of some young players, and the good loanees
One minor positive to be taken from this season is the performances of David Symington and, especially, Brad Potts. Symington was very disappointing towards the start of the season, and looked like he was well out of his depth playing as a right winger. Towards the end of the season, however, Symington began operating as a right wing back, in Kavanagh’s 3-5-2 system. He put in some very solid displays, even a couple where you could have picked him as man of the match. Brad Potts has been one of Carlisle’s glimmers of hope this season, at the age of 20, and with an England U19 call up to his name last year, he has showed some real glimpses of potential, if he continues to put in good performances, i can see him maybe becoming a very decent box to box Championship midfielder in a few years.
It was also a pleasure to watch some of the better loanees that we have brought in this season, Ben Amos, Tom Lawrence, Max Ehmer, Troy Archibald-Henville and Conor Townsend to name a few. I feel that if we had been able to secure Tom Lawrence until the end of the season, there’s a good chance we’d be looking at another year in League One.
As an addition, Courtney Meppen-Walter could be an excellent money spinner for us in the future, and has looked quite a good player whenever he’s played.
If only…
The sporadic quality performances
A positive within a negative really, some of the games in the first half of the season were a real joy to watch, the win on penalties over Blackburn in the League Cup (With Greg Abbott in charge, i must add) was one of the best games i’ve seen at Brunton Park and probably our best all round performance of the season. The win over Brentford in the cup and the draw at home vs Wolves were also particular highlights, the team performed quite well in the first half against Sunderland also.
Now, onto the next section, which isn’t as hard to fill…
THE NEGATIVES
Relegation
The ultimate negative to any football team’s season, relegation. We’ve been in the third tier of English football for so long i barely remember or know anything outside of League One. To go downwards rather than upwards after all the time we’ve spent in the division is quite hard to take.
Gutless performances
I’ll try and go through this without using the P word which no-one on this blog particularly likes. In my opinion one of the hardest things for a football fan to swallow is when a team goes down without any real fight. Sometimes you can accept a loss, you never think you’re going to win every game, but there’s a way to lose a football match, and too many times this season, Carlisle have lost showing no real desire, commitment or p…persistence. If Carlisle were ever leading by one goal towards the end of the game our fans were guaranteed a nervy finish, the other team would bombard us as we sat back and defended on top of the goalkeeper. If the other team were ever leading by one goal towards the end of the game, chances are, the opposition would be the far more likely to score. The latter is really hard to take, too many times this season we’ve seen our players strolling around the field while the opposition would be putting mountains of effort in and leaving everything on the football pitch.
To name a few players who were particularly disappointing, James Berrett, completely anonymous in 9 of every 10 games. Lee Miller, an absolute liability who held the club to ransom the year before and spent most of his time this season lying on the floor attempting to get a free kick, on the treatment table, or serving a suspension. Sean O’Hanlon, a shadow of the figure that saved us from relegation last season, showing huge signs of age. Most of our short term signings were disappointing, but i’ll get onto them later.
The rest of Graham Kavanagh’s spell in charge
Excluding games such as the ones against Tranmere, Brentford and Sunderland, this was a really dreadful spell to endure. I’ve seen some of the worst showings from a Carlisle team in years, our away form has been woeful, and in our final 15 games of the season we managed a measly one win. This is a fairly short section, but take it from me, it’s probably one of the worst seasons in memory, not just for myself and the rest of the younger fans, but many of the veterans too. I mentioned earlier that Greg Abbott’s sacking was the right move, i’m going to say it now, i genuinely think we’d have survived if Abbott had remained in charge, we wouldn’t have done particularly well, but i think he’d have been able to grind out the results that could have pulled us out of the mire. Under Abbott, most fans were disappointed that the team was performing poorly, under Kavanagh, there was a general expectation for the team to get battered week in, week out. Kavanagh ended the season with an average of less than a point a game.
Our inability to score is something that i can add onto this, our season is over and the last time we managed to score more than one goal in a game was back in February when we beat Coventry 2-1. I mentioned that we only managed one win from our last 15 games? Well, to add to that, we only managed to score 7 goals in that period, an average of less than half a goal a game, leaving us as the lowest scorers in League One.
Embarrassing defeats
5-1, 6-1, 4-1, 4-0, 3-0. All of these are scorelines which Carlisle have suffered this season, some more than once. This goes hand in hand with the gutless performances shown under both Greg Abbott and Graham Kavanagh. These are the sort of scorelines which just make you want to go into a shell and not come out again for a week or so. Occasionally you expect to receive this sort of scoreline, but the fact that it happened so many times this season is absolutely shocking.
48 Players used, and most of them useless.
To say that a team could possibly go a season managing to field 48 different players is truly incredible, and frankly embarrassing. Carlisle United did just that. Graham Kavanagh was the man especially at fault for this, loanee after loanee, freebie after freebie, a stream of players just kept flooding into the club, some of them spent most of their time on the bench, some of them spent most of their time injured, some of them spent most of their time running around like headless chickens. I could go on for ages talking about how bad some of our signings were (Nacho Novo, Charni Ekangamene, Kevin Feely, Paul Black,) and how pointless some of them were (Lucas Dawson, Dean Bouzanis, Craig Roddan). Kavanagh went the whole of his spell only fielding the same lineup in consecutive games twice. At one stage he had made 5 changes to the lineup 2 games in a row. In contrast, Lee Johnson at Oldham had fielded an unchanged lineup in 7 consecutive games and had not lost a single one.
Dwindling attendances and poor atmosphere
Now, i’m not expecting Carlisle United to bring in five figure gates every game, but if you look back at our days in the Conference, we were attracting crowds of about 7,000, this season, you would have been lucky to see that at Brunton Park if we’d played Wolves at home in beautiful sunny conditions. The noise levels have plummeted too, home supporters are almost always in poor voice at home, but even the usual chant of ‘UNITED!’ only occurred about 5 times this season.
Kavanagh scapegoating the younger players, inducing a fear factor
This issue was something that i didn’t really notice at first, but it grew on me towards the end of the season that the players were actually afraid of Kavanagh. At almost every instance in games, he would be on the edge of his technical area, shouting at his players, meaning they had to spend more time listening to him than they did actually playing their football. It had actually gotten to the point where players started looking over to Kavanagh before making runs, before playing passes and so on. They were so petrified of doing something wrong it severely limited their creative freedom.
Kavanagh also began to take the ‘Blame everything on the younger players’ mentality. Courtney Meppen-Walter was scapegoated nearly every time he made a mistake (I’m not going to defend him too much, because he has cost us goals in games before, and some of the criticism is just). It got to the point where he was subbed off in the game against Walsall for simply letting Romaine Sawyers get the wrong side of him early on in the second half. Kavanagh constantly brought up the point that the squad was inexperienced, that we didn’t have enough older players to assert themselves on games, despite the fact that the vast majority of the players that were being used were his signings.
Bizzare tactical decisions
This section will be pretty brief, and usually it’s not something that would be worth noting overall, but during some games this season, Kavanagh has made baffling changes that received a large backlash from the crowd. The first was the decision to take Courtney Meppen-Walter off during the game against Walsall, the second, an especially mind boggling one that was met with an especially negative reception, was the decision to bring Danny Redmond on for Matty Robson late on in the game against Oldham. The reason this was so hard to believe was because we had just gone a goal down, we had 20 minutes to save our season, we were in a win or bust scenario, we had a centre foward on the bench (Granted it was Lee Miller, but he’s still a striker). We needed a goal, so Kavanagh decides to bring on a creative midfielder for a winger, yep, you heard right.
Now, these wouldn’t usually be noted as particular negatives, but it was the reaction to them that really struck me, i honestly don’t remember any tactical decisions by Abbott being met with any boos or jeers during his whole spell in charge of Carlisle, but Kavanagh managed to make two within a matter of weeks. This really displayed how low Kavanagh had fallen within the fans’ estimations, and just how disillusioned with the club many of the fans were.
So that’s it. Carlisle United’s season was a horrendous one to endure for the most part and as a result, we’ll be playing our football in League Two next season, hopefully we can bounce straight back, we presently only have nine players on our books with many of our squad being released, so we’re expecting a massive overhaul this summer, this could go either way for us, so i hope to come back next season in lighter spirits.
Thanks for reading.
Craig.
Under The Floodlights 