Bow Me, We’re Going Through This Again!

Nat has written this article with the news that it’s now confirmed, that our new boss is Blues old boy, Lee Bowyer.

Some of us got pilloried for it for questioning the veracity of the reasoning behind Aitor Karanka’s appointment as Birmingham City Manager. I said on this very blog last summer that we needed a Manager who would be a specialist in HIAFKI – an acronym of a phrase coined by a proper HIAFKI specialist in Neil Warnock. We needed a Manager who would simply get the team to “Head it and f***ing kick it”.

And I have hated being proved right. Obviously, all I want is for Birmingham City to win football matches, to be as high up the league as possible. But Blues needed a pragmatist rather than a wannabe Philosopher in the dugout, especially for this season of all seasons. Of those obviously available at the time we needed to hire a Neil Warnock, a Mick McCarthy, a Steve Evans – we needed a manager who knew how to get the best out of what we had rather than force what we had to fit the manager’s rigid football philosophy. But the hipsters had their way and in came Aitor Karanka.

This season has been the worst I’ve known in the twenty-odd years I’ve had supporting the Blues. The football has been stultifying to watching most of the time, Karanka’s tactical decisions continually mystifying and the Manager’s lack of inspiration and imagination filtering through to the team has often been infuriating. Those who thought that it would never get worse than it was under the likes of Lee Clark – well this season has proved just how wrong they can be. There is no such thing as bottoming out in football; we have to kick, bite and fight our way back into respectability.

Talk of three-year plans, “projects”; for me it is vacuous, hipster terminology that has creeped into the game and more to the point creeped into Birmingham City’s bubble speak in recent times. As shown, three-year plans go out the window when the results and performances are continuously dire on the pitch. Projects get pulled apart like warm bread. The details of both may as well be written on toilet paper when applied to the reality of the day-to-day world of most football clubs.

If we needed a HIAFKI specialist before, we are absolutely crying out for one now. Lee Bowyer fits the bill; you don’t get a team competing like he did at Charlton in the circumstances without being a pragmatist and without having a bucketload of grit and fortitude. People point to Charlton’s relegation last season as a blemish on his record, but in the circumstances he did well to take a club as chaotic and skint as Charlton were to the Championship and then have them competing in the division.

There was an element of surprise that the club moved so quickly to secure Bowyer from another club; there was an expectancy that in the short-term somebody currently out of work would be coming in for the last ten games (namely Tony Pulis). There is also possibly an element of surprise that Bowyer was willing to up sticks so quickly from a now finally stable Charlton Athletic to come to a club as chaotically run as the Blues has been, even more so when you consider that there is a real chance that in ten games time (through no real fault of his own) Lee Bowyer could be back in the division he has just departed.

But there is something poetic about his arrival. Our new Manager is a bloke whose first interaction with Blues ended in the mid-00s with a fan petition allegedly prevented him signing for the club. His absence may have contributed to the loss of the team’s top-flight status that season, because a zesty Lee Bowyer in the midfield would have been a damn sight better than a feckless Nicky Butt. He went from that madness to eventually arriving a few seasons later and being a fulcrum of the side that achieved promotion from the Championship, a key player in the side that subsequently achieved the highest league position the club had reached this side of the Suez Crisis and to top it all was at the heart of the team that won the Carling Cup. If he keeps us up this season and if he ends up doing a good job at Blues, his elevation from Zero to Hero will be well and truly complete.

An eye must be on next season as well as the back end of this one with this appointment though, whatever division we are in. Whilst our position in the Championship relegation dogfight is not terminal it is perilous. If Lee Bowyer keeps us up this season, he will be feted and able to hopefully build on that next season. If we do drop, then at least we know we have a man in place with a track record to get us back up.

In the long-term? I’ve said previously that the club won’t ever make any progress until there is a change at the very top (above the Manager). Xuandong Ren should have gone a long time ago – there is absolutely nothing positive to say about his tenure at Blues. It has been one catastrophe after another with him in charge, and my hope is that the demise of Aitor Karanka finally leads to his demise as well. But as for the Manager, “long-term” could only be classed as starting and finishing the same season. The only way Lee Bowyer will be a long-term appointment is if in the relative short-term (at the back end of this season and the start of the next one) he is able to start stringing results together.

Nat