Jim Chimmerney
Can hear the 'Cod Army' roar from his back garden
Taken from t'net this morning, pretty much sums us up I reckon....
"Meet Sheffield United – a triumph of hope over reality, terminally unfulfilled potential weighed down by heritage and expectation. We are not alone but feel our pain.
Meet Sheffield United. Chip-on-the-shoulder, hard-done-to, proud working-class salt-of-the-earth guttural folk bravely facing up to the fancy-dan-southerners with their hot running water and their inside lavs. Unfashionable, brutish, knife and fork merchants, spirited and stubborn underdogs, unsophisticates trying to shake off centuries-old perceptions of smoking chimneys, thick, dark fogs, a smoky furnace of a place inhabited by rabid socialists.
Another essential part of our psyche is our mardiness – a take-the-ball-home-if-we-think we’re-not-being-treated-fairly kind of mardy. Sometimes our mardiness knows no bounds. It’s not something to be proud of and at the moment it’s getting in the way.
Stuck in the frozen stasis of the Championship, the Blades have got a pulse but there’s no-one home and everyone’s cross, they’re very, very cross. Blackwell’s now infamous Radio Sheffy interview after the drubbing at the seaside will go down in S2 folklore and made us enough of a local laughing stock to give the car park boys ammunition for a weekend demo. Boro’s refusal to stick by Southgate, despite their healthy league position, has been further interpreted by the boo boys as Boro’s proof of Premiership focus at all costs, and our lack of it. Who’d be a chairman?
Deserved or not, our Kev is under fire to the point at which Warnock is desired as a replacement (one step forward, three steps back). Kev’s the B52 pilot who’s sent out a distress message because he’s taken a couple of cheap shots in the wing, his left engine’s spluttering, he’s ripped off the oxygen mask and he’s jerking the throttle back to keep the mother-of-all-aircraft in the damn skies so that it can cough and splutter its way back to blighty as the flak explodes all around him. Beset by injuries, the tickly coughgate scandal and some incisive, but hardly outrageous questioning, Kevin had a BBC mardy doling out indignation and exasperation in equal measures at the suggestion that dressing room spirit might not be all that it should be. It’s the beginning of the end when the manager loses his rag with the local reporter. His pot nearly boiled over after the play-off final last summer but this was a step-change in mardiness and it was priceless and damaging.
If Kev’s cross, the fans are crosser. And no-one can agree if we play hoofball or a passing game. Sometimes we do one, sometimes another so the terraces are a battleground with the rampant win-ugly-as-long-as-it-gets-us-points brigade charge headlong down the field to lock horns with the brave sons of Woodward and Currie and the battle is ugly. Blackwell is simply the latest incumbent overseeing a recurrent nightmare for the Blades and our style of play.
At the heart of this nightmare is our expectation based on our history.
It is one thing aspiring to do something in the knowledge that to achieve it will be a major triumph over and above what you might reasonably have expected to be your outcome. But it is another to aspire to do something thinking that the major triumph was the very least that was expected. It’s a kind of hollow victory.
Being Prem is a baseline for us. That’s not arrogant; it’s just what the membership believes. Some might believe us misguided and urge us to accept a new order but we are stubborn folk. Success is much, much more than the Prem and we’re nowhere near even that yet so we have to decide if Kev’s the man to deliver our lofty expectations.
Getting to the Prem should be considered an achievement, but not for us. Blades fans would simply say: “Back to where we belong - now the real work begins”. It is this line of thinking, the weight of our history, which is currently holding us back and sets a backdrop against which success is always expected and failure requires public floggings and self mutilation. That’s what we’ve had this week and that’s what’s been promised at the weekend. Instead we should coolly put aside our mardiness and the rest of our psychological deficiencies and decide once and for all whether or not this man is the right manager for us based on his and the team’s performance so far.
We’ll have to wait and see if the car park attendance really has momentum on Saturday. That will depend not necessarily on victory or defeat, though defeat would make things extremely difficult, but the manner in which we play against a handily-placed Cardiff.
Whatever happens, expect some early fireworks at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane and much burning of effigies."
"Meet Sheffield United – a triumph of hope over reality, terminally unfulfilled potential weighed down by heritage and expectation. We are not alone but feel our pain.
Meet Sheffield United. Chip-on-the-shoulder, hard-done-to, proud working-class salt-of-the-earth guttural folk bravely facing up to the fancy-dan-southerners with their hot running water and their inside lavs. Unfashionable, brutish, knife and fork merchants, spirited and stubborn underdogs, unsophisticates trying to shake off centuries-old perceptions of smoking chimneys, thick, dark fogs, a smoky furnace of a place inhabited by rabid socialists.
Another essential part of our psyche is our mardiness – a take-the-ball-home-if-we-think we’re-not-being-treated-fairly kind of mardy. Sometimes our mardiness knows no bounds. It’s not something to be proud of and at the moment it’s getting in the way.
Stuck in the frozen stasis of the Championship, the Blades have got a pulse but there’s no-one home and everyone’s cross, they’re very, very cross. Blackwell’s now infamous Radio Sheffy interview after the drubbing at the seaside will go down in S2 folklore and made us enough of a local laughing stock to give the car park boys ammunition for a weekend demo. Boro’s refusal to stick by Southgate, despite their healthy league position, has been further interpreted by the boo boys as Boro’s proof of Premiership focus at all costs, and our lack of it. Who’d be a chairman?
Deserved or not, our Kev is under fire to the point at which Warnock is desired as a replacement (one step forward, three steps back). Kev’s the B52 pilot who’s sent out a distress message because he’s taken a couple of cheap shots in the wing, his left engine’s spluttering, he’s ripped off the oxygen mask and he’s jerking the throttle back to keep the mother-of-all-aircraft in the damn skies so that it can cough and splutter its way back to blighty as the flak explodes all around him. Beset by injuries, the tickly coughgate scandal and some incisive, but hardly outrageous questioning, Kevin had a BBC mardy doling out indignation and exasperation in equal measures at the suggestion that dressing room spirit might not be all that it should be. It’s the beginning of the end when the manager loses his rag with the local reporter. His pot nearly boiled over after the play-off final last summer but this was a step-change in mardiness and it was priceless and damaging.
If Kev’s cross, the fans are crosser. And no-one can agree if we play hoofball or a passing game. Sometimes we do one, sometimes another so the terraces are a battleground with the rampant win-ugly-as-long-as-it-gets-us-points brigade charge headlong down the field to lock horns with the brave sons of Woodward and Currie and the battle is ugly. Blackwell is simply the latest incumbent overseeing a recurrent nightmare for the Blades and our style of play.
At the heart of this nightmare is our expectation based on our history.
It is one thing aspiring to do something in the knowledge that to achieve it will be a major triumph over and above what you might reasonably have expected to be your outcome. But it is another to aspire to do something thinking that the major triumph was the very least that was expected. It’s a kind of hollow victory.
Being Prem is a baseline for us. That’s not arrogant; it’s just what the membership believes. Some might believe us misguided and urge us to accept a new order but we are stubborn folk. Success is much, much more than the Prem and we’re nowhere near even that yet so we have to decide if Kev’s the man to deliver our lofty expectations.
Getting to the Prem should be considered an achievement, but not for us. Blades fans would simply say: “Back to where we belong - now the real work begins”. It is this line of thinking, the weight of our history, which is currently holding us back and sets a backdrop against which success is always expected and failure requires public floggings and self mutilation. That’s what we’ve had this week and that’s what’s been promised at the weekend. Instead we should coolly put aside our mardiness and the rest of our psychological deficiencies and decide once and for all whether or not this man is the right manager for us based on his and the team’s performance so far.
We’ll have to wait and see if the car park attendance really has momentum on Saturday. That will depend not necessarily on victory or defeat, though defeat would make things extremely difficult, but the manner in which we play against a handily-placed Cardiff.
Whatever happens, expect some early fireworks at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane and much burning of effigies."
