Season Review 2009-10

What a strange one!

The fourth year of That’ll Be The Day maintains the record of each season Gillingham being in a different division to the year previous, and just how did it happen this time around.

They went into the last game of the season the unlikeliest of the clubs involved to be relegated but still managed to make it happen and I still scratch my head as to why. How can a team that managed to amass 44 points from home fixtures end up relegated, easy when you only end up with 50. Six measly points on the road without a single away win makes for some pretty depressing travelling and boy did we have some bizarre days.

Who would have predicted the final outcome back in the warmth of August’s opening day. The old enemy, Swindon Town, were rolled to one side in a stunning five-goal blitz and for two hours we were the embryonic leaders of League One. Two away defeats followed, but the performances at Tranmere and Colchester were encouraging and offered no clues to the barren travels that would follow.

By the end of October the alarm bells were starting to ring despite a mid-table position. Solid home performances were being undermined by a record of a solitary draw at Walsall in eight away trips and the early encouragement in defeat had been replaced by some heavy defeats at Leeds and Southampton and woeful performances in defeat at Milton Keynes and Brighton.

October also saw the first of our travelling nightmares with a Friday night game at Southend. Friday is always a perilous night at the Dartford Tunnel and this particular rush hour saw a two hour wait to enter the tunnel and a mad dash once we had made it through. We missed the first 20 minutes and Gillingham wrapped up a forgettable night with another defeat.

The very next of our travels took us to Bristol Rovers and a day of torrential rain, it also became known as dog shit day. Needless to say, we lost, albeit to a late goal after an inexplicable mistake by loanee Matt Fry. After a difficult journey home, as a passenger, I drove my own car back home from my brother’s house. Whether through tiredness or just plain bad driving I misjudged the whereabouts of my front step and burst a tyre on its corner. In the rain, I decided that changing the wheel could wait until the next day. What Sunday brought was a second flat tyre, so now I had to wheel one of the tyres to the local garage for changing and in the process I wheeled it through dog shit and onto my hands!

These occurrences come in threes and so it was to the most bizarre of the lot. The next away fixture was at Leyton Orient and once again the Dartford Tunnel comes into play. Despite a delay we are still in good time when we come to a halt on the A12. East London was gridlocked by a prat on a roof throwing bricks at passing cars and for the first time in my football watching life I missed the match that I had set out for as we failed to get to within a couple of miles of Brisbane Road. And, par for the course, Gillingham lost with half of the team stuck in the same jam also not making the kick off.

By the turn of the year a second away point had been extracted from 12 games on the road but still the home form was keeping our heads above water. The harsh winter was also beginning to take a grip and a trip north to Accrington for a FA Cup 3rd round match had to be aborted at Oxford because of a frozen pitch. A visit from Premier League Fulham was to be the prize but the in the re-arranged tie Gillingham meekly surrendered.

In February saw a horrific defeat at Brentford followed by a rare defeat at home to Tranmere and now alarm bells were well and truly ringing as Gillingham slipped into the bottom four and the calls for Mark Stimson’s head were ever louder.

Results slightly improved, still no away wins, but the points tally now registered at six with an uplifting experience at The Valley coupled with a home win over promotion-chasing Huddersfield seeing Gillingham once again clamber clear of the bottom four.

The final run-in and woeful performances at Oldham and Millwall were counter-balanced with superb home wins over Southend and Leeds and when Southampton were beaten at Priestfield in the penultimate game surely nothing could go wrong at Wycombe.

The fates at Adams Park decreed that a spineless showing in a 3-0 defeat was worthy of results elsewhere conspiring to put Gillingham back into the Football League’s basement after just one season.

Were we unlucky? Perhaps so. For every one of four results to go against us, is indeed unfortunate, but the fact remains everything was in our hands and we blew it.

Mark Stimson’s tenure was quickly brought to a close in its wake and the vast majority shed no tears.

In the Ryman Premier, another manager, Tommy Warrilow was also feeling the heat around the turn of the year. Languishing in the bottom four and slaughtered at Hastings soon after New Year, Tonbridge went on a run of just two defeats in 13 games, unbeaten in 10 to haul themselves not only clear of the relegation zone but onto the fringes of the play-offs and, indeed, they mathematically went into the final game of the season still with a chance of making the top five. But fixture congestion and three final games, all away from home, were too much of a mountain to climb and defeats at Wealdstone and Aveley sealed their fate.

The reason this Review is late on the board is because of England’s participation at the World Cup, or should it be non-participation. Qualification had been nigh perfect, there was the memorable night in September when our old nemesis Croatia were put to the sword with a stunning 5-1 victory and our place in South Africa sealed with games to spare. In the Croatia match posting I wrote:

We go to every World Cup Finals with misguided hopes, the cart goes in front of the horse and we are always left disappointed. Will those expectations be different this time? Probably not, and mainly because we are good, very good.

Well, I got the horse and cart right, but good? Oh dear, oh dear. What happened in South Africa needs no reviewing aside from the unnecessary observation that we were crap.

From a personal point of view, all the planning that went into making the trip for the later stages of the competition went tits up as the Germans wiped the floor with us. Money that, for the most part will be refunded, had been tied up for months but it was the undoing of all the carefully prepared strands that was the most heartbreaking.

New stadiums for Colchester United and Milton Keynes were visited with MK being easily the more impressive. Pre-season added three more to the list with Dartford’s highly praised Princes Park, the less than salubrious Thurrock and a French visit to Calais and their new stadium.

End of season totals: Games 2,067. Grounds: 235