‘A comeback didn’t look on the cards. Then came Ellis’

Saturday’s win over Rotherham United at the Mem has calmed most folk down a bit, hasn’t it?

Before last weekend, the knives were well and truly out – fans at players, manager at players, fans at manager, manager at board. Everyone was having a right old go. It almost gave me a bit of nostalgia for the bad old days, where everything at Rovers was totally disfunctional and a crisis was only around the corner. The previous week’s pretty valiant performance in defeat to a very good Blackburn side didn’t help, either.

Failure to beat a pretty rotten visiting side last week may have sent the atmosphere down a further couple of notches. Being at home to a mediocre side hasn’t been a guarantee of three home points this term so far – Oldham and Wimbledon should’ve come way empty-handed earlier this season, and would have done so in previous years – but the boys avoided a repeat performance.

Let’s be honest: most hearts sank when we went 1-0 down, having failed to take a good half-a-dozen chances in the game to that point It looked like ‘same old story’. Mugged in possession, caught on the break, and punished for it. Rovers aren’t known for their glorious comebacks in 2017/18, and, having still not drawn a single game, a point may not have been on the cards. We have, after all, fallen behind in 13 games this year and lost all-but-one of them.

Then came Ellis. Young Mr Harrison, often the standout performer this season, grafting away when the team are a few clear goals down, used some real guile to chest a high ball down, fool the defender with the bounce, and prod Rovers back on terms.

It only got better for the Newportonian; his audacious, no-look scooped pass over his own head to Liam Sercombe to set up the winner was, to use an overused word, sublime. Harrison has come in for stick in recent years, not all of it unwarranted, but I don’t think anyone ever doubted that there was a really good player in there somewhere. I’m told he’s worked on his fitness, which will help, and any time on the training ground with that king of blue-and-white quartered forwards, Marcus Stewart, can’t hurt.

Speaking of training grounds, hopefully this win distracts from the ongoing gripes at the club. Clearly, the Memorial Stadium is a relic from another era, not fit to take one’s young kids to (I mean, a ‘family’ area with terracing?), and also, while 99.99 per cent of us would never have set foot inside the club’s training ground, the coaching staff say we need a better one. I’m happy to take them at their highly qualified word on that.

However, the decrepit nature of the club’s off-field offering is 30 or more years in the making. I understand why, after a run of poor performances and disappointing results, that the negativity comes out, but I do wonder what some folk think will happen if they tag the club’s fresident in a poorly-spelled Facebook post asking “where’s the UWE”, as if this was his idea? It’s in Frenchay, mate. Always has been.

Wanting better for our club, is, joking aside, perfectly natural, but hopefully the win last week is Rovers, to use another well-worn cliché, turning the corner; with good form comes more breathing space for people to get these things right. The issues don’t go away, of course, and this board will be ultimately judged on what happens to the stadium and the training facility, but Wael Al-Qadi’s somewhat awkward interview with the club’s legendary press officer (and all round excellent bloke) Keith Brookman pre-game was testament to the tensions born out of a run of losses. Would there be so much focus on slow training ground progress and question marks about stadium improvement if we’d just won four or five on the bounce? I doubt it. Certainly the manager wouldn’t have been talking about it quite so much.

Anyway, I digress. Southend United visit Horfield on Saturday December 9. Phil Brown’s boys are a decent side, perfectly capable of springing a win, which’d be about as welcome in North Bristol as an episode of the very poor sitcom I just made a pithy reference to. They’re reasonably tight at the back, but also don’t usually go on to rack up a load of goals in games. The core of their side is made up of aging former Premier League talent, and when the legs don’t go like they used to, perhaps the tactic is to take the lead then shut up shop.

When that doesn’t work, they’ve been handed out some real hidings away from the Essex coast this year. Your correspondent isn’t sure that Rovers are quite yet at the level of performances where we could take enough of our chances to inflict such a battering on a fairly good League One outfit, so the prediction here is either a 1-0 home defeat, and the knives coming out, or a 2-1 win from behind, like last week, with everyone pulling together and screaming the lads over the line. It certainly won’t be a draw. It never is.