Whilst it was finally cruel to be relegated in the way we were on Saturday at Pride Park, over the season we got what we deserved. Yes, the players discovered the bottle to fight back and get a point from a losing position, but we gave stupid goals away, as we have done all season. If you lose to the two other teams in the bottom three you deserve to be relegated. If you throw away nearly 30 points from winning positions, you deserve to be relegated. If you have a bunch of spineless players who don’t show enough commitment to the cause you deserve to be relegated. If you have 5 different people managing the team in one season you deserve to be relegated. If your team has no identity whatsoever you deserve to be relegated.
Some of us will remember the sitcom Dad’s Army and the committed and well-intentioned leader Captain Mainwaring. But he was also bumbling and incompetent and spent too much time listening to doomed suggestions from his platoon of followers. See the similarities with Mr Chansiri? Read Nancy Frostick’s recent piece in the Athletic on the shambles that has been the running of SWFC in recent years. This club has been going backward for four years now since the loss to Huddersfield in May 2017 and that regression has resulted in our club spending a fourth period in League One, and the third period in this century. Mr Chansiri has made mistake after mistake after mistake – getting us into a position where we lost points due to FFP, but then messing up playing the last card we had to get out of it so badly that we got the points deduction anyway was the worst.
It is good that Mr Chansiri issued an apology and took responsibility in his statement on Saturday evening. It was good that he confirmed that Darren Moore will be staying as the team now needs some stability. But the statement was woefully short on even the outline of the plan that is needed to turn this listing ship away from the iceberg that it is currently drifting towards. We have known that relegation has been a real possibility for months, but still no plan is available to give us confidence that lessons have been learned – we now have to wait even longer to see if there will be one. The required actions in the SWFC Trust statement seem good to me:
- Mr Chansiri to take a clear step back from the running of the club; instead adopting a modern, forward thinking structure that is likely to include a new Chairman, a CEO and non-executive board members in place to lead and manage it.
- Implementation of a long-term strategic plan for the club; that plan must be focused on sustainability and building the capacity of the club so that it can operate successfully in a challenging environment.
- Affordable ticket, merchandise and hospitality pricing that attracts fans and businesses to the club rather than repelling them.
- Effective engagement with supporters and the Sheffield community, so that we all feel “we have our Wednesday back.”
Our club first suffered relegation to League One in May 1975 after another disastrous season in which we deserved to be relegated. But at that time the sense from the fans was that they thought the team was rubbish, but they didn’t feel as apathetic and as alienated from the whole club as they do now. In May 1975 Elton John released his album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy – the title inspired the title for this piece, as did the May 1975 irony. Thousands of fans now genuinely fear for the very future of their club. A 'Championship Return Ticket' is not at the forefront of their minds right now. The club having any kind of stable future is right at the forefront. Mr Chansiri now needs to discover his inner Captain Fantastic and get a grip, or his Captain Mainwaring persona needs to seriously consider resigning his Commission.