An Admission of Guilt

Birmingham City tumbled to another home defeat yesterday, going down 4-2 to Bournemouth despite a second half rally where Federico Macheda scored twice. The result leaves Blues in 20th place, five points ahead of Barnsley in 22nd who have a game in hand.

I have an admission to make here. I’m a terrible, terrible fan. I wasn’t at the game yesterday – had made absolutely no plans to go – and I didn’t even think about the score until my friend called me from the game with the score at 0-3. It’s not that I’m “boycotting” or anything like that – it’s just at this moment in time I’m struggling to raise myself to go to the match – and in honesty it’s as much to do with the understandable grumbles and apathy off the pitch as the performances on it. I can’t help but wonder if I’m not the only person who feels like that – and if that feeling has also been transmuted to the players who just don’t seem to be able to put the performances in at home that they can away.

Of course, with the gap to the bottom three having closed once more there is the inevitable murmurings about relegation interspersed with anger against Clark for leaving us in this situation. There seems to be a divide between people who think Clark is blameless because of the stuff going on behind the scenes and people who think it’s all Clark’s fault because of his poor management – and I’m not sure if I’m interpreting it wrongly but I don’t see many people who can see Blues are in the situation because of a combination of factors – we have an average, maybe technically limited manager working with technically limited players and limited resources with an ownership structure who seem powerless to change that. As much as people think a change in manager or change in owner will make things much better I’m of the opinion all three have to change to some degree before we’re back to anything like we were a few years ago.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Blues Ladies take on Arsenal Ladies this afternoon knowing that a draw or victory will see them in the UEFA Women’s Champions League semi-final against Tyresö FF of Sweden and just two matches away from a showpiece European final in Lisbon in May. It’s a quite incredible achievement for Blues – especially bearing in mind the bookies had them at 5-1 at the weekend to beat Arsenal in the first leg.

For the men, Saturday is the crunch once again. If we can beat Doncaster we’ll go above them in the table and bring them into the mix. It would also put pressure on Barnsley to keep winning their games too to keep them in the hunt to stay up. Blues have done fairly well this season when it’s come to crunch away games and I hope that Clark can once again hit on the formula to get us out of this mess.