Since You Been Gone
I hadn’t meant to say any more about the defection of Ian Holloway to Leicester City. What’s done is done, there’s a new regime at HP and we have more pressing things to concern ourselves, such as denting the promotion push of upstart new boys Bristol City on Saturday (a side, bizarrely, I’ve always had a fair bit of time for). But the fact remains that he just won’t leave it alone. Instead of getting to grips with his new team - and let’s face it, for all Mandaric’s money, LCFC are a below-par, uninspiring motley collection of journeymen, raw youth and unadulterated crap - Holloway has been chasing the media wagon like a junkie short of a fix, desperate to put ‘his side of the story’ and explain to the world at large that he’s NOT a compulsive liar and NOT a money-grubbing tart like the rest of the football world. His latest interview with the BBC is an embarrassment beyond even the Curb Your Enthusiamesque pantomime on Soccer AM: he rants at Stapleton and Sturrock and threatens, in faux Arnie terms, to return and plunder Argyle for the riches he was solely responsible for bringing to the club in the first place.
In order to try and bring some sense of realism to the hyperbole flying around at the moment, lets just take a breath. Holloway left - and he admitted this himself - because he wasn’t up to the, yes enormous, challenge of getting Argyle promoted. In the end, he realised he wasn’t man enough for the job. Let’s be honest. It will, with Mandaric’s money, be a darn site easier to get Leicester up than us: in fact, it ought to be a cakewalk. A donkey should be capable of getting them promoted with the resources at their disposal: hardly “the biggest challenge of my career”. No, by far, BY FAR, the bigger challenge is getting Argyle, a club with no money, not much of a permanent fanbase and bugger all sense of history and tradition, into the promised land of SkyPrem. Holloway, quite simply, couldn’t handle the magnitude of the task. Fair enough. But he should now shut up about it. And if he thinks Norris, Halmosi and Ebanks-Blake are meekly going to follow him to Leicester, he may be in for a shock. They’re all on long contracts and Stapleton and Sturrock have made it plain that no-one is going without Argyle receiving well above the going rate.
Argyle fans could do themselves a huge favour and simply deny Holloway the oxygen of attention he so desperately craves. Rather than haunting Leicester fan sites and getting embroiled in the utterly pointless ‘we’re better than you’ playground debates, we should simply be vocal in our support for Luggy and the team, be TURNING UP home and away. Above all, we need to roar the boys on tomorrow. We’re traditionally poor in front of a big crowd: and we need to win tomorrow, if we’re going to keep the play-off positions in our sights. The team will need every ounce of lunchtime lung-busting we can give them.
