Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here
It is Sunday morning in Preston, one of those early autumn days on which it feels like the sun has badly overslept and allowed a slate grey sky to fill the stage.
Ten paces away from Sir Tom Finney’s statue The Splash, one of English football’s greatest artefacts, a gentleman is handing out leaflets and exclaiming into a microphone: “Only Jesus can save you”. Those walking past hope that new manager Paul Heckingbottom might do the job.
The reminders of Preston North End’s greatest servant are everywhere, extending around Deepdale and Preston itself like the spray from his iconic sliding dribble water feature. There’s Sir Tom Finney Way and the Finney House community healthcare centre, both within a stone’s throw of a stadium whose largest stand also bears his name and has his face on the seats.
There’s The Sir Tom Finney pub on Central Drive and the Sir Tom Finney Sports Centre on the west edge of town. There’s the Sir Tom Finney Community High School in Ribbleton. It’s hard to think of anywhere else in England where the eternal presence of one footballer is more pronounced.
Perhaps Finney’s continued omnipresence is where we should begin this story, given all that he represents. Not only was he a constant force, a one-club man in English football at a time when the league’s first champions won only a single, second-tier trophy, Finney also stood for the principle of football as entertainment.
“It was a golden age,” Finney said before his passing in 2014. “We felt a responsibility to entertain after the war.”
Entertainment, as will become clear, is a tricky subject these days in Preston.
A year to the day before I arrived, walking the circumference of Deepdale and ending back where I started, finding myself gravitating towards Finney cast in bronze, life felt good here.
Preston were top of the Championship with six wins from their first seven matches, an astounding start given preseason expectations. Then came Preston’s own gravitation, pulled towards mid-table. They start this day in the bottom three.
I’m ostensibly here now because Preston changed manager after their first league match of the season, the most effective way to gain national notoriety for a brief period before the Premier League began the following weekend. Ryan Lowe’s exit was sold as mutual consent, but supporters suggested that it raised questions of those above him.
Peter Ridsdale is a director and Craig Hemmings is the chairman. Hemmings took over the ownership of the club from his father, Trevor, who sadly passed away at the age of 86 in 2021 and reportedly had invested £100m of his personal wealth into the club. Kathryn Revitt worked as the chief executive of companies owned by the family and is a director of PNE Holdings. She has sway too.
In 2022, Hemmings openly welcomed new investors into the club if they could take it forward, but has continued to invest in it in the interim to the tune of roughly £12m a year. There was a reported bid from American Chris Kirchner that failed to materialise; Kirchner has since been sentenced to significant jail time for fraud. In January, Ridsdale laid out the ownership situation.
“Without them [the Hemmings family], we would be out of business,” he told BBC Radio Lancashire.
“For those who think we should be opening the doors at Euxton and looking for someone with an oil well under their arm, we keep opening the door and having a look – but there is nobody there. Under Financial Fair Play rules – even if a multi-billionaire turned up tomorrow, you can only lose so much money every year and we are right up against that at the moment.”
If that creates an image of uncomfortable inactivity hampered by economic reality, it was a landscape into which Lowe was, for a while, able to flourish. He initially reunited the fanbase and provoked record season ticket sales. Last season, Preston secured their third highest league finish in 15 years. It wasn’t all bad.
But here’s the thing. If you know that your owners are open to selling, and you know that your club loses money, you crave escapism on some level. Lowe was unable to provide it and that became the whole of his reputation at exactly the point when supporters needed something else.
There was a thread on a popular Preston internet forum in February 2023 simply entitled: “Bored.” One of the more popular posts was from a user who described how he used to check the other scores at half-time but had begun to do so during the match itself for reasons of entertainment. He’d found himself checking the Scottish Highland League scores during one match. That counts as a low for Lowe.
Lowe’s deliberate tactical conservatism often worked. Preston started 2022-23 in extraordinary manner, winning two of their first seven matches 1-0 and drawing all of the other five 0-0. But when it stopped working effectively, patience and faith drained away quickly.
Preston scored in only one of their final eight games of last season and lost their last five without scoring. If there is blame to be apportioned to the decision makers, it is for a lack of proaction in making a change then and giving a new manager a summer and preseason.
This is a wider problem than any one manager, one that asks existential questions of the football club itself.
Preston exists in a distinct hinterland. Of the 72 EFL clubs, only Newport County have spent longer in the same division and they have been to two play-off finals in the interim.
This is Preston’s tenth straight season in the Championship and they have finished between seventh and 14th every time. You could make a case for them being the Football League’s least exciting club of the last decade.
A football club needs jeopardy, for better or worse. It must glimpse at a golden sunset or escape from its own incompetence.
Here, there has been little jeopardy. Preston haven’t finished in the bottom 10 of a league table since 2012. Their points total over the last six seasons is unerring: 61, 66, 61, 64, 63, 63.
Football clubs – managers, staff, directors, players – often crave consistency as a platform to build a dream. But consistency is only useful until exactly the point that it becomes the majority of your identity. Remember that season when we won an extra game? No, them neither.
Some matches smack of a 0-0 draw even within the first few minutes; watch enough football and you get an unerring sense for these things.
This early kick-off Lancashire derby signposts as much with flashing neon lights. Blackburn Rovers are flying under John Eustace but unable to knit together moves without smothering Preston resistance. Heckingbottom’s Preston look a lot like Ryan Lowe’s Preston – they are barely able to attack at all.
We are given brief respite by braindead decisions and two red cards, one for Preston’s Sam Greenwood’s wild challenge and the other for Blackburn’s Owen Beck doing something very similar. There is an accusation of biting by Milutin Osmajic on Beck in the aftermath that provokes a Football Association investigation. Just my luck for the real drama to be pored over long after I have left town.
That second red card causes a flurry of late Preston pressure, as if they have realised that they are allowed to score goals as well as thwart them.
The derby ends with a total expected goals (xG) figure of 1.2, the third lowest in a Championship match this season. Preston’s total is 0.4, the second lowest in the division by a home team. Can you guess whose record they beat? Yes, their own.
Preston North End 0-0 Blackburn Rovers (Sunday 22 September)
- Game no.: 19/92
- Miles: 136
- Cumulative miles: 2984
- Total goals seen: 46
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The Splash, the Tom Finney statue that is one of English football’s greatest artefacts
Preston are in part a product of their own environment. After the club announced a £12.2m annual loss, Hemmings made a statement on the official website about the financial inequalities in the Championship in favour of those with parachute payments.
You see his point: Preston lose £12m and are at their limit. Leicester City lost £89.7m in their most recent published accounts, received around £40m in parachute payments in the first season and were able to build a squad perfectly capable of automatic promotion despite selling players. It’s tough out there for clubs like Preston.
And so back to Finney again, and a line in his 2003 autobiography about the game he loved deeply: “It is not so much the game itself that has changed, more the business that not only surrounds it but threatens to strangle it”.
The problem for Preston, for those tasked with taking them forward and for those who are so desperate to witness a transformation, is that we have recently seen examples of clubs who have broken the mold: Ipswich Town and Luton Town.
In fact, perhaps they help posit a theory. Ipswich reached the Premier League after a double promotion, provoked by an inspirational manager but preceded by soul-searching about what and who Ipswich must be. Luton finished in a higher league position than their last for seven years in succession and earned three promotions in six years until 2023.
What if, counterintuitively, it’s easier to rise up quickly than push from a stable platform?
It makes some sense given the financial imbalance within the Championship. The more often you find yourself in mid-table, the more likely you are to stay there. You find it difficult to push on and compete with the parachute payment clubs, you lack the momentum of a club with recent success (even in a lower division) and there is less motivation to make significant changes (and thus take significant expensive risk) because you haven’t been in danger of relegation. And so on you risk staying, stuck in suspension.
Which would be fine if always being mid-table was deemed as appealing by supporters; it usually isn’t.
There is a misconception that your team being bad erodes the spirit of a football fan – not true. Often these are the times when our support is displayed most. What erodes our spirit is boredom, because boredom creates subconscious apathy.
As the match ends, supporters file out following merciful cheers thanks to the late, thankless attempts to find a winner. Preston have moved out of the bottom three, edging slightly back to their natural habitat and all the angst that causes. Those proclaiming God’s love outside Deepdale have moved on; the offers of help are best delivered before kick-off rather than after full-time, it seems.
Next to Finney’s statue, where a few away supporters with an appropriate respect for tradition have stopped to take a photo, a young Preston fan and his father chat about the game, analysing its various aspects for a couple of minutes. The dad offers the damning conclusion: “It were a fair result, mind, because both sides were crap”.
They will be here next time, even so – what else can you do when this is your club?
Perhaps something will change at Deepdale soon, be it owners or mood or simply a shift away from the magnet of mid-table mediocrity and the existential ponderings that causes. Maybe Heckingbottom will cause a surge, as he did at Sheffield United. Maybe Preston will fall into the third tier and come back stronger
But it’s hard to see any of it happening quickly. We’re striving to ignore strong probability in favour of unlikely possibility. I have one last look at The Splash. Behind it stands a fine football club that desperately needs to cause one of their own.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/NLmrFC3
Post a Comment