Dark times

Harrogate Town 2 Hartlepool United 1 (League Two, Saturday 15th October 2022)

The problem with trying to do a football blog is that sometimes life gets in the way hence the gap in entries for the last month or so. I had planned to go and see Eccleshill play Emley the week after the Thackley vs Maltby game but obviously a certain royal death put paid to that one. Then the weekend after that we had my in-laws staying at the house. Then the weekend after that we had friends up visiting from Cornwall. Then the week after that my wife was ill with Covid. Then the week after THAT, we were in London for my wife's birthday. However, this fixture had been in the diary for a couple of months and I wasn't going to miss it as it's the second nearest away game to where I currently live this season. And rest assured that lost time will be made up for in the next few weeks.

The last time I went to see Pools play at Harrogate, it was a pre-season friendly, they were in the Northern Premier League and we were in League One having come within a whisker of the Championship the previous season ("Where were you in the great play-off final defeat of 2005, dad?" "Row Z seat 34, son. God, it was hell.") And we lost the game 3-1. Looking back, it was a foreshadow of things to come that season as a Pools team "bolstered" by half a dozen new signings who were considerably worse than the players they were supposed to replace and a manager, Martin Scott, who was pretty much a textbook definition of ineptitude, crashed to relegation.

And speaking of inept managers and relegation...it's safe to say the start to our season this time out wasn't going well either. Paul Hartley, brought in from the Scottish League with quite a bit of fanfare a couple of months before, had been summarily sacked after failing to win any of his nine league games in charge, a record which must put him down there as one of the worst Pools managers of all time - quite an achievement given some of the clowns we've had in that post down the years (Bobby Moncur, Viv Busby, Craig Hignett, Colin Cooper et al)

For once, the club had acted quickly to bring in a replacement in the form of Keith Curle, arguably the sort of grizzled veteran League Two manager that Pools needed at this point. Thus far, the club had managed to get a win, two draws and a defeat from Curle's first five games which had seen them edge up the table. The style of play had become a lot more direct with the club moving to a 4-4-2 formation which seemed to be working well - certainly in Josh Umerah we had a striker who was big and burly but deceptively quick enough to benefit from playing this way and the signs were promising. Having seen Pools struggle badly when trying to play "total football" in the past and often get bullied off the park by teams as soon as they realised that by pressuring us that we'd quickly fall to pieces, it was quite nice to see Pools dishing this sort of treatment out for a change. Incidentally, a lot of the managers guilty of the "try and walk the ball into the net...oh and by the way, there's no plan B" approach had previously been coaches at Middlesbrough under Gareth Southgate. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Add to that we were playing a team who were, shock horror, actually below us in the table and I was actually feeling quite optimistic coming into this game as I hauled my half-asleep carcass across to North Yorkshire for the stupidly early 12:30 kick-off. Harrogate had been promoted to the league for the first time in their history a year before Pools returned but after a respectable mid-table finish in their first season, they'd got off to a storming start in their second only for their form to completely collapse after Christmas and the club to finish 19th. The rot had continued into the new season with an impressive 3-0 opening day win over Swindon at Wetherby Road proving to be something of a false dawn and the club only winning one further league fixture since. Surprisingly, there was no talk of the manager's job being under threat...but I suspect that's mainly because Town's manager Simon Weaver (who I remember as an absolute brute of a centre-half for Lincoln during his playing days) is the son of their chairman Irving which is probably why I had them down as one of my relegation favourites at the start of the season. As I'm sure the aforementioned Gareth Southgate will tell you, once opposition teams have worked out how to undo your tactics easily, it's a slippery slope.

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way. Two shocking defensive lapses saw Pools 2-0 down after 40 minutes and there was no way back. The first goal saw two defenders go for the same ball, both miss it and give former Pools transfer target Alex Pattison an easy run through to open the scoring while the second saw a cross evade everyone apart from Harrogate's Jack Muldoon who got a free header at the far post. A change of formation in the second half and a late consolation through Umerah who capitalised on some poor Harrogate defending was little consolation.

Looking at the team performance, while it looks as though Curle has the right idea, the truth is that thanks to Hartley, he's inherited a team that's simply not good enough for League Two. Both of Pools' centre-halves Murray and Lacey had the look of a pair of rabbits in the headlights for most of the game. Jamie Sterry, brilliant for much of the last couple of seasons, looked decidedly rusty after being rushed back from injury while our captain Dave Ferguson struggled due to being played out of position at centre-half and our left-back Brody Paterson, an ex-Celtic youngster, just looked lost and was subbed off at half time. The midfield wasn't much better - Mark Shelton, a star of the promotion campaign a few years earlier, was completely anonymous as was Tom Crawford, another who looked much better last season. The introduction of Wes McDonald who'd been our super-sub in the last couple of games, did at least add a bit of pace on the left but he ducked out of a lot of challenges and his final balls into the area were pretty poor mostly. Add to this others in the squad such as Tumilty and Hastie who had been signed by Hartley and quickly proved to be way below the standard required at this level to the point where they were now just taking up a slot on the wage bill that could be better allocated elsewhere, and the picture was pretty bleak. The only bright spot in the midfield was Mo Sylla who at least showed a bit of urgency in the first half, making the runs and tackles that his teammates were conspicuously failing to do and getting involved before mysteriously being subbed off at half time to be replaced by Callum Cooke who at least tried but looked well short of match fitness and was struggling to keep pace with his opposite numbers in the Harrogate team. Up front Josh Umerah had his usual decent game and new signing Theo Robinson, thrown into the team a mere two days after signing from Bradford, looked decidedly short of match fitness but did at least put himself about and put some pressure on a shaky Harrogate defence.

The annoying thing is that in truth, Harrogate weren't much better and were really there for the taking. Aside from Pattison who was a thorn in Pools' side all afternoon, they looked decidedly short on quality and I get the impression a better side than Pools would have punished them. Ex-Poolie Luke Armstrong buzzed about a bit but missed a couple of sitters and was mostly ineffective - if anything he looked as if he'd gone backwards since his days banging in the goals at the Vic a few years ago while the rest of the team were largely anonymous. My view that, like us, they're in for a season of struggle hasn't changed on this evidence. Incidentally the attendance at the game was 2100, 700 of whom had come from Pools. Again, draw your own conclusions from that.

As for Pools...to be honest, I think the best thing to hope for right now is that we can at least keep pace with the rest of the pack at the bottom over the next couple of months and avoid the gap growing too wide before the transfer window comes around and we can clear the dead wood out and hopefully get some players who can roll their sleeves up and put up a fight. We shall see...