‘Rovers are a lucky club right now’

Every team gets thumped at least once a season. Every single one. Arsenal Wenger great Invincibles of 2003/04, who went an entire league season unbeaten, still got pumped 3-0 by Inter Milan in the Champions League. At home.

So, a defeat away at the New Den is no cause for alarm. Even if Rovers did get sunk by four goals to nil. According to the universal rules of football (not the official Laws of the game, but the clichéd, unwritten list of things that always seem to occur) an early red card puts a team “on the back foot”. Which is a little harder to stomach when you see that the red card was brandished for Dan Leadbitter’s arm brushing the Millwall forward’s side with all the brute force of an autumn leaf hitting the pavement as it floats off the tree. The BBC referred to it as a “rash challenge” but it barely looked like a challenge, let alone a rash one.

If only the match official had followed another of those universal rules, the one that refers to avoiding the use of the red card early, as it ruins games. Or he could have just looked up the actual Laws and seen that it wasn’t a foul. 

No team is whiter than white these days, exaggerating contact and falling over at the slightest touch is something even our blue and white quartered heroes occasionally do, but to see the Millwall player, Aiden O’Brien, celebrating getting an opponent sent off isn’t a nice thing to see. Obviously I sincerely hope our Dan doesn’t challenge him a little bit harder when the sides meet again in May.

Anyway, my point was, if you’re a man down and losing the game, any side would leave gaps at the back, let alone a swashbuckling side like ours (pun very much intended). On another day, the Lions wouldn’t have been so clinical but, as that great football philosopher Brendan Rodgers often said, “we go again”. I can’t tell you how much I dislike that phrase but it is true. Also true is the notion that some days, despite all your best efforts, everything just works against you. As it did on Saturday.

I dare say that Darrell Clarke might have been more annoyed about Tuesday night than Saturdays defeat. The number of chances made but not taken against a hard-working but technically inferior Crawley Town side left us waiting an extra half hour before the FA Cup tie was finally decided. But then Mr Clarke is a more patient man than most of us, and was full of praise for the boys despite the fact that he must’ve been freezing cold. Maybe it’s the warm glow of seeing Rory Gaffney back in the goals. To merely say he scored twice wouldn’t cover it as both goals were superbly taken chances.

Three League games come before Barrow make the herculean trip to BS7 for the Second Round, and two of them are at the Mem in the next few days.

Both opponents are managerless,  which is odd. MK Dons, Saturday’s visitors, sacked dodgy-haired Liverpudlian Karl Robinson not long after they meekly surrendered three points to us at the end of the reverse fixture in October. Bizarrely, they’re in talks to replace him with another Scouser with a bad hairdo in the shape of one Steven Gerrard. I’m not sure how decades of Champions League and international playing experience equips the ex-Liverpool icon for a team sitting 21st in League One but it’s only as strange as  everything else that goes on in our game.

I’m not sure that Stevie G is going to rush home from Los Angeles for the weekend, even if the offer of a warm pasty and the chance to be even further away from Donald Trump does appeal. 

Charlton Athletic, having just said cheerio to coach Russell Slade, sit a disappointing six places above the Dons, rooted in mid-table. But to say that this doesn’t tell the full story of the Addicks’ season so far is the understatement of the year (yes, even this year!). If you’ve not read about their disgraceful owners and their wanton destruction of a proud club, I suggest you Google “Charlton pigs”.

Once we’ve soundly beaten them (and that is likely, given that they gingerly submitted to a 3-0 reverse at Swindon the other week), we can show some solidarity with the Charlton support, some of whom rather brilliantly drove to Belgium to spoil said owner’s birthday party. It makes you realise that we’re a lucky club right now, as things stand. Which is why the odd thrashing , like the one on Saturday, doesn’t ruin anything. It doesn’t even ruin the day out. A wise man once said, “never let the football ruin a day at the football”. Amen to that.

James Hodges is Bristol24/7’s Bristol Rovers columnist for the 2016/17 season.

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