It Hurts

Article appeared in Killie Hippo 86 (out 14th February 09)

Do you know, I am hopefully off to Canada to live for a year in the next few months, I have preliminarily sorted a visa and have the final forms and all that to fill out. I cant wait, I really cant. Anyway, I am going to make a confession, in the past few weeks and months since this Canada business picked up pace I had been thinking about the Scottish Cup final and us in it, and thinking about waiting off booking flights and even getting my forms away so that my leaving date coincides with the final or making sure I have enough money weaselled away without the girlfriend (travel partner) getting to suspicious so that if it came to it and I was away I could afford to bring myself back for a weekend to see us in the final. I had a wee sneaky feeling about it all, had almost convinced myself.

I was in Inverness on Saturday and now feel like a tit for thinking all that.

What a load of crap that performance was, a club from chairman down who seem not to care a jot about the fans who follow them in numbers big and small. Its time our Killie got behind us, the fans, for a change and stood up for us instead of continually asking for it the other way. Saturday Hurt.

Lets see who we are talking about here, the notoriously fickle hard to please Killie fans, yes that’s us, we turn out in numbers regular but never get any credit in the press. At away games we consistently turn out better than the fans who visit Rugby Park but get no credit (but who cares) when at home we are constantly (in my opinion) short changed by penny pinching club officials who for my money doctor the attendances as wee homers. What happens then is journos and pundits who weren’t there read the attendances for Killie home games and pigeon hole us as not turning out to support our team. that’s how I see it anyway. So that’s us, Killie fans.
This is beginning to read as totally disjointed and it will continue to do so till my name reads at the bottom, this is due to rage building as a write this and trying to get a million points across. Here goes, one at a time and briefly, starting at the top.

MJ
The club issued a thank you to the fans who made the journey and asked them to get behind the team v Hibs (today) so we can look to put our season back together. This pathetic attempt really shows the gulf between MJ and the fans. Really, was this supposed to appease us? Yer man must know what a fractured group we really are because this merely pays lip service to what actually was a black day for Killie. Our team is allowed to hide away in Glasgow all week training and there is no interaction with the life blood, the fans.

JJ
How many time do we have to hear that it was a dodgy refereeing decision that killed off our chances again? A penalty but the snow blurred the lines, was just the latest in a line of excuses, but wheres the apologies, apologies to the fans for such a poor poor performance from a team who have zero fear for their places, these fans who risked quite a lot to make the journey into the snow on buses and trains and in cars moving at fifteen twenty miles an hour for miles and miles along the single file road to the north of the country. Where is the reassurances that you will read the riot act, that you have read the riot act that this should never happen again. I mean our tactics, we sign a player who genuinely could be the real deal, his goal and play at St Mirren could see him show up as the best headerer of the ball in Scottish football and against ICT we feed him the sum total of no good crosses. We win a free kick (the penalty) and we let Gibson shoot instead of swinging it over. And why do we always have to hear about how its all done on a shoestring budget? As if that safeguards against questions of where money was actually spent? Promised a striker at AGM’s in December, signed one late January, the one we originally had, hit a snag, did we ever have a striker lined up or was this just a ploy to appease us idiots?

The Players
Underachieving the lot of them. Game after game the same bunch of guys, no-one seems to get dropped for poor displays (well except for Wullie G but then he gets back in the team without any real reason so why drop him) We have a squad who seen to think they have made it but what this season has proved and was completely crystalised in Inverness is that we have a petulant bunch, who fold when the going gets tough. They have talent, this has been seen at times during this season when we go ahead and look like a right good team but more often than not we go behind to poorly defended goals and spend the rest of the games going through the motions. Not good enough, seems like they don’t particularly give a toss about it either, or us for that matter. Too often it feels like they slinky off after defeats safe in the knowledge that they live miles away and wont have to see us for another week, games like Saturday, this all seems like a bitter and twisted attack and for that I am sorry, the first paragraph explains the misguided faith I put in my team this year and though I have no right to expect my wish to come true, flat performance after flat performance hurts.

The Fans
Do we expect too much? Well no would be the answer, no teams fans deserve success all the time but application and effort and a keenness to appreciate the fans they have and help improve our fan base by giving us something to be proud of when we get behind our team would be nice. Constantly we are asked to get behind our team, but when it comes down to it, this season possibly more than most, we the fans need our club to get behind us and as it stand they fail on all measures.