Sea-Sea-Seasiders Sea-Sea-Seasiders…
Occasionally, I have to be permitted a bit of self-indulgence and today’s post is exactly that.
Last Sunday, the mighty Blackpool gained promotion to the second tier of the English game for the first time in twenty nine years. Furthermore, the Seasiders won a club record ten consecutive games to close the season after only winning one of their first twelve matches and sitting in the relegation zone.
Coincidentally, the game that relegated the Pool all those years ago was my first experience of a fixed football match and, with hindsight and a touch of creative thinking, might be seen as the initial prompt that would lead to my becoming a professional gambler and, indeed, to creating the Football Is Fixed blog. The match was between Cardiff and Orient and only one outcome would lead to the Tangerines being relegated and, sure enough, that outcome came to fruition and Blackpool went down with the highest points total ever for a demoted side from the old Division Two.
The intervening years have produced some joy but much pain – losing twice to Altrincham in the FA Cup wasn’t exactly a grin and neither was turning a 2-0 1st Leg Play Off Semi Final lead gained at Bradford into a 0-3 home defeat thanks to some highly imaginative goalkeeping by a certain Eric Nixon and some idiotic presumptions of success by the Blackpool hierarchy (putting travel plans for the Wembley final in the match programme was utilised by the Yorkshiremen as a motivator, for instance).
The current Blackpool side is the best I’ve seen since the team of Mickey Walsh, Paul Hart and Peter Suddaby that repeatedly flirted with promotion to the top league and, equally, repeatedly failed at the last possible moment. Valeri Belokon, our Latvian owner, is targeting the Premiership title within five years which is entirely realistic, of course, if viewed through tangerine tinted glasses. More importantly than impossible tangerine dreams is the prospect of mocking the hillbillies of Burnley and the idiotic town of Preston again. Those distant memories of deciding to drive through Preston on a return journey to Manchester from Blackpool to celebrate a relegation for the lillyshites still linger on. We must have been crazy!
Blackpool is a big team with a big history. It deserves it’s place in the Championship and seeing 45,000 tangerine clad individuals at Wembley is an indication of the pulling power of the Pool. The players devoted the victory to all-time great Jimmy Armfield who is fighting cancer and the recently deceased Alan Ball (who was still a Blackpool player when he ran the show in the 1966 World Cup Final that still defines the mentality of the English fan).
Until recently, Blackpool received more tourists annually than Greece and all of it’s islands, but urban decline has been the pattern of late and it is interesting (and slightly disturbing) that the only blip in the Pool’s march to promotion was seen in the weeks following the government’s decision to place the first super-casino in Manchester rather than on the Fylde coast. The town doesn’t need fake urban regeneration of this type.
However, there are two factors that would allow Blackpool to become a proper force once again in English football. Unfortunately, the reopening of the bidding process for the super-casino is one of these factors. If Blackpool were to be selected in the first or second wave of victim locations, the club would inevitably benefit in a range of ways. Secondly, if Sepp Blatter were to succeed in achieving a summer football season, again the Seasiders would gain from the tourists popping in to see us hammer Chelsea via a Kiegan Parker hat trick.
I’m still in a slight state of shock over the performance of Blackpool’s promotion, Celtic’s double, FC United of Manchester’s title and AO Kerkyra almost remaining in the Hellenic Super League by achieving a draw away to the mighty Panathinaikos on the final day of the season. The clubs that I follow hardly represent glory hunting and it doesn’t come much better than this. At the very least, the success of Blackpool will lead to Bloomfield Road’s reconstruction being completed and I noticed that the first under cover stand is being erected in Garitsa (which is surely the only ground in the world where two countries, Albania and Greece, may be seen from an idyllic island). Additionally, one would hope that the Pool seek out a more robust shirt sponsor than Pointbet – the Indonesian bookmaker who disappeared underground in January closely followed by the policing authorities. The corruption in the game has tentacles which stretch a considerable distance down the English game.
But, for today, who cares?
Ee-I-Ee-I-Ee-I-O Up The Football League We Go…
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
