The news about Brendan’s four year deal has sent shockwaves through Sevconia. This is not entirely unexpected. The smarter ones know what this means, but even the dumbest of them have a sense of it and they suspect that this is Bad News.
They are wrong. This is catastrophic news.
The other day, I read an article on people who have survived falling from tens of thousands of feet without wearing a parachute. It is exceptionally rare, but it’s possible, especially if you are heading towards a relatively “soft” landing such as on snow, or towards something with a lot of give, which can break your fall to an extent but without crushing you; hitting canopy trees is a pretty good option, if you have them in the vicinity.
If you are high enough, the crucial factor in your favour is time.
Remember, for two bodies of equal shape, falling in the same posture, in our gravity, terminal velocity is the same whatever height you start from … about 195mph. All things being equal, a fall from a sky-rise balcony will see you hit the ground at exactly the same speed as if you’d fallen from a commercial airliner.
If you fall from 5000 feet you’ll reach terminal velocity and hit the pavement in seconds.
There’s no time for a reaction, or thinking through what your chances are.
Fall from five miles up and you have a couple of minutes to do the very few things which can nudge you out of the Dead Zone towards possible survival, such as making sure you are falling in the correct shape (the skydiver position slows you relative to pointing straight at the ground like a bullet), and bracing correctly for landing.
I’ve often described Sevco as being in freefall. It’s an apt description. They too could survive the crash, but it will take a miracle and the one thing they don’t have on their side, which is time. Brendan has signed up for four years. There’s now a timestamp on Sevco’s ability to save itself. I cannot say it more plainly; this is a crisis for their very existence.
They have 48 months to adapt or die.
For any struggling organisation, 48 months would be ample time to adopt new strategies and turn things around.
But for every day of it the focus will be on short term gains instead of long term prosperity. Before it ends they will risk everything – the very survival of their club – on one throw of the dice, just to stop us from securing ten titles in a row.
They just appointed Pedro Caixinha. Assume he gets a full year, because anything else would have to represent a total meltdown. So, say seven in a row is secured and he’s got until the end of next season, guaranteed. Depending on how the league table looks, can they afford to give him a second term? Because if that goes wrong, and we’ve made it eight … you see the problem? A new boss would need to rebuild the team and set his own stall out … is that going to possible in a season? If not, that would take us to nine. The guy would need to be a sure-fire winner to stop us from making it ten, and would they believe in him enough?
If not, that would be Brendan versus their fourth manager since he arrived.
What chance would that guy have, knowing he had that season and that season only to do the job?
What kind of state would their club be in if they went through four years of that?
Would fans still be going every week?
Remember, the whole Journey thing was sold to them on the basis that Scottish football hated them but they would soon be back on top. It’s been six years; the appetite is wearing thin. The romance went out of it long ago.
This is a club which can’t make ends meet on 35000 season tickets. How long will they last if that drops by 10000 or more? As long as the hope of stopping us exists they might still attend out of wounded pride and ego; once that hope is gone, what then? What if ten in a row is secure and we’re marching inexorably towards eleven?
When #goingfor55 is our slogan not theirs?
How many do you think will be convinced to buy season tickets then?
I’ll tell you, their club will melt down like Chernobyl far in advance of that happening. Brendan Rodgers is a threat to their very existence; forget administration. If they are forced to genuine penury there might be no way back for them.
The downward spiral might even have started already; any hope they had of putting in place a “long term strategy” to tackle us went by the boards the second their last management team left, whatever the circumstances were there. They have been forced to start again under a guy a lot of their fans aren’t sure about at all, and who’s staying power is in serious doubt already. All of this is to say nothing of the structural flaws which threaten them.
Whatever way they twist and turn here, the damage Brendan’s first season has done to them and to their “strategy” is probably debilitating in the short to medium term. But if their board handles it wrong – if they don’t take the time to put genuine foundations in place which offer the fans at least hope of stopping us at some point – the damage will be far worse.
As I said earlier, the chances of surviving a freefall without a parachute are vanishingly small. All you can do is skew things ever so slightly in favour of survival. Giving the manager more than a year won’t guarantee they won’t crash anyway. Giving him two or three wouldn’t give them much more chance than they’ve got right now … but a little is more than none, and at the moment their club is in a shallow dive, arms out, facing down.
That increases terminal velocity to the point where an impact would be fatal even if you landed on the world’s biggest bouncy castle.
I am pretty thrilled by all of this, of course. I am enjoying the freak show and just knowing that what could be coming might be even more entertaining that what’s already come before is just tremendous, and worthy of a few beers tonight.
With their focus ever on us, and their warped view of their own supremacy coming evermore into contrast with the real world, I don’t know how they manage to maintain even the thin veneer of sanity. Aberdeen better brace itself for the coming weekend.
The Peepul aren’t exactly in a friendly mood at this moment in time.
