9. ‘Take the handbrake off’
Apparently, somewhere in the Lincoln City dugout, there is a lever which determines whether our players are allowed to attack. When we win comfortably, the manager has released it, and when we struggle to break somebody down, he’s pulled it back on.
I understand the analogy, but it reduces football to something absurdly simple. Michael Skubala used to get this regularly, as though a player approaching the penalty area was suddenly remembering an instruction to stop enjoying himself and pass backwards.
Of course managers influence how adventurous a team is. Under Mark Kennedy, for instance, we often looked like a side whose first priority was avoiding conceding, and there is a perfectly legitimate discussion to be had about that approach. However, a cautious structure doesn’t mean every missed shooting opportunity or safe pass is evidence of a manager personally forbidding attacking football.
There is also the small matter of the opposition. Beat ten-man Northampton comfortably at home and we’ve finally taken the handbrake off; struggle away against a Burton side determined to deny us space and apparently we’ve put it back on again. Perhaps the other team had something to do with it.
That’s what frustrates me most. It takes a game involving two teams, different circumstances and hundreds of individual decisions, then explains the whole thing with an imaginary car part.
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