Blues board miss the point

I always like to be proved wrong, especially if it's about something I don't like. Unfortunately it appears I've been proved right in my previous assertion that the Birmingham City board have put their friendship with Steve Bruce above what's good for the club. Today's Daily Mirror has an interview with David Sullivan (see here) where he complains about dwindling attendances on the one hand, and then tells the fans they have no say in who manages Birmingham City on the other.

To quote Sullivan, "I am very disappointed with our gates this season." (The Mirror goes on to remind us how he rescued the club from receivership in 1993. I'm guessing we should still be grateful to Tony Blair for rescuing us from Tory rule in 1997 too, never mind what's gone on since. But anyway, I digress.)

Sullivan goes on to say, "I am a little bit down and a little bit worried, especially as people still expect us to go out and spend in January... I know some of the supporters are not happy with the manager but some fans want to change managers every three months. People rush into things without thinking of the consequences. We are not in the habit of changing managers. I don't think people realise what it costs, and in any case it is morally not right. We have to support the person we appointed, and the board here like Steve very much. I like him as a pal because he is a nice person and I also think he is a hell of a manager. So we're not about to do a bad thing to someone we like and end up no better off than we were in the first place."

The best line of the entire interview? "You judge a manager when things are down, not when you are on a roll. The Norwich game was really appalling and Steve took a good hard look at things and admitted he had got it wrong."

This is the same man who claimed the alarm bells were ringing last October for our Premiership survival. Clearly his logic about judging a manager when things are down didn't extend to getting one point out of the first seven home league games (against teams we'd previously got a good record against), or losing 3-0 at home to Middlesbrough because he picked players out of position - not for the first time, and not for the last (just ask Neil Danns, who is currently employed on the right-hand side of midfield despite being a central midfielder). Or perhaps losing 4-1 away to Man City when he named a player on the subs bench who was 100 miles away at the arrival of his child (Emile Heskey)? Perhaps it was the 7-0 home thrashing in the Quarter Finals of the FA Cup? Or the fact that Bruce's answer to the fact relegation was by then staring us in the face was to shut up shop and hope to draw his way to safety as Portsmouth pulled out all the stops to stay up? Nope, clearly things weren't down at this point. We'll overlook our proud record from the year before when we managed to win twice in 25 league games, because we don't want Sullivan thinking we judge managers after three months. No, we judge them after a pathetic run of form stretching over two years and 100 league games.

Let us give Bruce credit for the last four games: he's gone to what he knows best, being hard to beat. He's ground out some excellent away results, and put us back to where we should have been when the aforementioned Norwich game took place. That's great, but it's not pretty, and rightly or wrongly, Blues fans won't pay Premiership prices to watch their expensively assembled team try and nick a string of 1-0 wins to be "there or thereabouts" at the end of the season. So attendances will continue to dwindle while the Blues board show us their loyalty is always to their mate before the good of the club.

One last thing: "some fans want to change the manager every three months". This from the board who have employed two managers in the past ten years. I don't recall people wanting Bruce sacked after three months into his Blues reign - he had an easy four years - the last 18 months of which were dross - before people started questioning his position. But it's easy for Sullivan and Bruce to question the loyalty of fans who've followed this club through the hard times and what constitutes good times for Blues. After all, looking hard in the mirror at their own abject performance over the past 18 months is clearly asking too much of them.