Only character on the pitch will lift Millwall's gates
2:21pm Wednesday 8th February 2012 in Latest Football News
Former player Bobby Bowry didn't exactly pull the crowds in at Millwall
NEWS Shopper online’s Millwall columnist MATT LITTLE this week suggests the club’s hierarchy might have unrealistic expectations about boosting attendances at The Den in the current economic climate.
IT has taken all my will power to summon up the energy to write this week’s blog.
I’m used to us being rubbish, but this season has been so up and down it is quite draining.
On one hand we’ve stuffed Leicester City and Barnsley away, results that would be rare in a promotion season, but on the other we’ve suffered some truly desperate results and lacklustre performances.
And it certainly doesn’t get more depressing than meek surrenders to local rivals like Crystal Palace and, dear me, West Ham United.
Even more frustrating is the fact we don’t really have a scapegoat or boo boy to take it out on.
Most Lions fans feel Kenny Jackett has earned some grace because of previous achievements, although that currency is dropping in value faster than the Euro, and most agree the players are an honest bunch overall.
Take David Forde for example.
An honest pro and a good character, his season has been one of extremely poor errors and some magnificent saves.
Zero or hero? No one can say.
The whole team has been the same, you really don’t know which Millwall side you are going to get from one week to the next.
Yet our chairman has asked an extra two thousand of us to turn up every home game and pay the best part of £30 for this rather frustrating football lottery.
As an American, he probably thinks his charity deserves to see some positive developments.
But this is Bermondsey, not Baltimore.
While there are more than enough Millwall fans to fill every plastic blue seat down at Zampa Road, us Lions fans are a cynical bunch.
Like most Millwall fans, I suspect, I know more people who don’t go to the game than do.
We have only averaged more than 14,000 once in the last 25 years.
So quite why our chairman thinks probably the most cynical set of fans in the country will start turning up in numbers not seen since the days of Sheringham and Cascarino when the country is deep in recession and we’re deep in a relegation battle, I’m not sure.
We have an amazingly loyal hardcore of about 7,000 fans, who have kept going in the most dire of seasons, even when Bobby Bowry and Ricky Newman were prowling less than menacingly around the Den’s hallowed turf.
But we also have a legion of day-trippers who only like coming if the sun is out, we’re going up or if some lairy northerners are in town.
Perhaps that’s why we have been linked with far out rumours regarding making Roy Keane our next manager.
The chairman might think we need a bit of box office glamour to get some of those 30,000 missing bums on seats. Who knows?
Whatever, hopefully some of those day trippers come out to see the Lions take on Bolton Wanderers in the FA Cup fifth round and pick up the habit.
Thank God for the FA Cup is all I’ll say.
If we can send the Trotters packing, make the quarter-finals and stay-up then this season will most certainly be rescued.
A lot of ifs, granted.
The fine line in football really is that fine though, even miserable defeats to the Happy Hammers and Ultra Eagles will be forgiven and forgotten and our flirt with relegation will be remembered as exciting and courageous.
You see, that’s what football is all about.
I was down in the dumps on Saturday, but a win at a depressing and empty bowl stadium in a competition more scorned than public sector workers under the Tories and I’m over the moon.
Those extra Millwall fans have turned up before Mr Berylson, be it for cup games (FA Cup or mickey mouse), or in League One or the Championship, but for teams that show character and win games.
I would bare that in mind.
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