Harrogate Town opinion: Sulphurites don't know whether to stick or twist during home games

When Harrogate Town achieved promotion to the Football League in 2020, I joined a League Two fan site on Facebook.

To be honest, I mainly did it to mention the book compiling my early columns for the Harrogate Advertiser that I’d put together and published in lockdown.

Any publicity’s good publicity and I thought a ready-made audience of like-minded football fans might throw up a couple of people who’d buy it, and a good conversation into the bargain. So, I penned a short post with the back cover blurb and a picture of my book and uploaded it. Or so I thought.

I received a short note back from the administrator of the site pointing out that advertising of any sort wasn’t allowed, as it was purely a site for fan ‘banter’. It’s hardly like I was a big business or anything and it’s a book written from a supporter’s perspective, but it was fair enough as I hadn’t read the rules of engagement in advance.

It turned out that the ‘banter’ on display usually turned out to be mostly along the lines of ‘X won again, going up!’, ‘Referee at X a disgrace today, never a pen’ and ‘Here’s my score predictions for the weekend’.

Town were often referred to in disparaging terms such as ‘tin-pot’ or scorned for the size of our crowds and stadium: the insinuation being that we had no right to be in this league with ‘big’ teams such as X or Y. Let’s just say that self-awareness, nuance and self-deprecating humour were in fairly short supply.

Eventually, homophobia came to the fore in a post mocking Sutton fans flying a Pride flag at Barrow (instead of the ‘obligatory’ St. George’s flag, I presume). I found myself wondering, if my post was rejected by the administrators, why wasn’t this one?

The site rules stated you’d be banned for racism, sexism, abusing a fellow member and selling merchandise amongst other things, but homophobia didn’t even merit a mention, let alone transphobia.

It’s at this point I realised the small returns and petty bigotry made it not worth the time spent, so I gave up engaging, having never felt the urge to post anything anyway aside from laying into the bigots in the Sutton post. This, of course, would have violated the site rules…

It’ll come as no surprise then that, before I stopped engaging, the two teams most mentioned in a post reading something like ‘Who will be relegated this season?’ were Town and this weekend’s opponents Crawley purely, one gathers, on the basis of size. No love of the minnow here, it’s all about size.

The fact that our clash with Crawley this weekend was a mid-table clash, with neither team in danger of relegation, fills me with some considerable pleasure therefore. It’s nice to prove the doubters wrong, even if they’ll forget they ever doubted in the first place, and will probably give the same answer, with all certainty, to the same question at the start of next season.

Yet, even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day, as the sight of fellow small clubs Forest Green and Sutton struggling will confirm. It’s up to Town to make time stand still.

It’s not as simple as all that, of course. Having briefly flirted with the play-offs and gotten everyone excited, it’s a disappointment that we’ve now not won in six after defeat to Crawley.

To those of us who attend most of our games at Wetherby Road, and that’s the majority of us, 10 defeats sees us watching a team three points off the bottom of the table based on home form. If you travel away, eight victories means you’re watching a team in second place. So, I guess mid-table’s about right.

But why is this so, and what can be done about it? Well, you won’t be surprised to find that I have my own theory. I agree with Simon Weaver that our players can be tentative at the EnviroVent Stadium and I believe him when he stated that they said all the right things at half-time in terms of getting into our opponents’ faces right from the off.

The trouble is that whilst our set-up, with only one up front, may be perfectly suited to falling back and grinding out away results in hostile environments, at home with the pressure on to attack more, it just doesn’t work.

We end up in a sort of half-way house where the players are trying to please the fans by going forward without the requisite numbers, hence not keeping the ball or succeeding in pushing our opponents back, whilst losing that suffocating formation in defence. It’s the worst of all worlds as the players don’t know whether to stick or twist.

You can see it from the kick-off, as time and time again, we end up sitting off in a more defensive formation allowing the visitors to dictate the early stages of the game, as Crawley did for spells on Saturday.

True, we should have put two or three past Crawley in a purple patch before half-time, as the confidence flowed after the opening goal, but we didn’t and ultimately paid the price.

Postscript: I revisited the League Two Facebook site whilst researching this piece and encountered a picture of a pie at Harrogate Town with the caption ‘shout out to Harrogate Town Football Club on what I believe was one of the best pies I’ve had at a football game! Unreal taste and flavour (pie and smiley face emojis)’.

What’s more, there were loads of complimentary comments underneath about the catering at Wetherby Road. Maybe the tide is turning...