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Now that the season is almost over and we’re finally safe, it feels like a good time to take a break from the relentlessness of social media. I think it has run its course for me now, but (obviously) I can’t walk away without leaving behind a few final reflections.
When you set an objective as clear cut as “we must be promoted” and you associate not achieving that with failure, then you unfortunately set yourself up for disappointment, especially when that goal has a limited chance of success.
24 teams will once again compete in the EFL Championship in the upcoming season, but only 3 of them can achieve this binary objective. Probably 15 of them will to some extent be targeting promotion and maybe half of those will be relying on it for their, ahem, “business model”.
So, at least half of the clubs in the Championship are looking at disappointment with maybe even a quarter facing a genuine possibility of misery. It’s an odd way to set out on a new season when we’ll actually be telling ourselves we are optimistic.
In the meantime, at Forest, we’ll be revisiting some old arguments, such as whether Joao Carvalho should be given a chance or has had enough of them, and no doubt setting the bar to maximum with our nailed on, definitely this time, manager.
Perhaps letting go of the promotion dream is actually the way to realise it. Maybe giving Carvalho a chance is the right thing to do whether it works or not, because it is part of setting parameters of activity that begin to define our process.
Maybe sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got. Instead of trying to turn this squad into a promotion squad, we could focus on some realistic improvements, an evolution that gives space for those still here to add value and those who come in an environment to thrive in.
Carvalho is probably never going to be any good but there's a part of me that thinks we should learn to live with our mistakes in the hope we’ll make fewer of them. Constantly replacing last year's poor decisions, with more poor decisions, is the cycle we really need to break.
I love something Buck O’Neil said about his baseball career: That’s what I remember most, stories. Don’t remember the games much. Don’t remember the names much. Don’t remember the bad times. I forget who won and lost most of the time. Stories. Silly Stories. I remember those.
Maybe success, or purpose, isn’t defined by whether we get promoted but by the stories we make together as we try. Anyway, that’s my say done. This place seems to reduce everything into an argument and I’m tired of it. It’s time to get back to making stories. See you at a game.
