Strange to see players digging their own graves. Strange to see privileged existences being treated with scorn. But then if we compare this current squad with the one a decade ago – Chris Maxwell, Danny Andrew, Stephen Crainey, Conor McLaughlin, Mark Roberts, Nathan Pond, Gareth Evans, Antoni Sarcevic, Steven Schumacher, David Ball, Ash Hunter, to name just a few – it becomes clear that Fleetwood Town 2024/25 has been monumentally gutted.
Losing Zech Medley, Harrison Holgate, Brendan Wiredu, Elliot Bonds, Carl Johnston and Callum Dolan (while out on loan at Oldham) to injury has been difficult. Losing loan players and permanent players Bosun Lawal, Promise Omochere, Junior Quitirna, Elijah Campbell, and even Shaun Rooney, following relegation from League One, has been quietly devastating.
Fleetwood Town now is a team without leaders, without hard men, without guile and belief. Merely a collection of individuals buffeted by winds. No grit. No fire. No determination. No desire to plant a flag in the ground and colonise or compete.
The ousting of Charlie Adam – ex-footballing great at Rangers, Blackpool, Liverpool and Stoke – through the dreaded ‘Club Statement’ raises many questions therefore. Is football’s dependence on talented midfielders, seemingly fast-tracked to Head Coach roles, now finally exposed or broken given the pretty wretched form of most? Steven Gerrard (32% win record for Aston Villa). Frank Lampard (27% for Everton). Paul Scholes (14% for Oldham). Paul Ince (28% for Blackpool). Charlie Adam (28% for Fleetwood).
Charlie did his best. He was dignified, diplomatic in front of the camera for post-match interviews and perhaps even cared about the ‘old enemy’ Fleetwood, nine miles up the road, after spending two seasons playing for Blackpool before his big money move to Liverpool in 2011 for £6.75m. Perhaps he could have even donned his boots for Fleetwood this season given their evident lack of poise and purpose in midfield.
A spy he was not though, despite the keen conspiracy theory doing the rounds. He was also not a tactician. Nor a man given to roastings when the entire fan base at times wanted this squad strung up. Charlie’s best moments came with the quick-release football seen earlier in the season – confidence, doggedness, swagger and sex appeal.
For a moment. For a brief period. For a fleeting ‘F*ck, this is gooooood’.
That was before winter set in, however. Before injuries stripped us bare. Before we realised that Charlie doesn’t have a ‘Plan B’ – just the steady, painful, textbook management of men who do not adapt.
Many occasions, many Saturdays, Mondays and Tuesdays demanded that a quick-thinking leader change formation from the drudgery of 5-3-2. That same leader needed to give youth a chance, rather than rely on the predictable, flaky cogs of what went before; that same XI keen for their pay-checks, but not alas the demands and rigours of football, and the pillaging of three points.
Not seeing the weaknesses (or strengths) in this team too – that was Charlie Adam’s undoing, his inevitable demise, his sweet garnish when what was required, what is required is ruthlessness. Yes, he had limited options, but favourites and bias started to surface. A kind of Charlie’s Angels muddied the water – players who would start the next match despite having a stinker.
Charlie never got the best out of Phoenix Patterson, Fleetwood’s able, diminutive architect. He failed to comprehend that you cannot put silk together (Danny Mayor and Mark Helm) when huge lawnmowers are coming at you. Charlie stubbornly continued with five at the back and two up front when it became increasingly obvious that more personnel were needed in midfield (preferably a couple of tough b*stards or ex-secret service men).
Self-fulfilling prophecies happen a lot. Charlie’s was Fleetwood Town’s inability to win, their fear of winning. Expectation and belief crumpled under the weight of life in the grubby night club known as League Two. Just five league wins out of 19. Truly, truly embarrassing.
What happens now? Which ‘magic man’ will be next? Hopefully not an ex-great flashing his medals and barnstorming career in the face of the chairman, but rather a man from the gutter, a man ready to cast aside players’ reputations and initiate a ‘Moneyball’ revolution at Highbury, finding recruits willing to put in the yards.
“Fleetwood Town is in my blood and my aim is now to work as hard as I possibly can,” new owner and chairman, Jamie Pilley, said in the summer. “We fully intend to build a squad which is capable of competing at the right end of League Two.”
That squad, capable or not, has been seriously dented in recent weeks – left looking like a two-wheel Reliant Robin. If Pilley Jnr – having just turned 28-years-old and with the immense responsibility of guiding this successful club in the absence of his arguably more astute father – is to appear credible, then he must understand the perilous position Fleetwood are in.
Sacking Charlie suggests he does. But what comes next could elevate the town once more or possibly kill it. A second relegation and Fleetwood will, in all likelihood, never return. Escaping the National League, English football’s fifth tier, is akin to wrestling with a lion while blindfolded. Just ask Oldham, Rochdale and Yeovil. And let’s not forget Torquay and Scunthorpe languishing in tier six.
“It go Halle Berry or hallelujah / Pick your poison, tell me what you doin’,” Kendrick Lamar sang in Money Trees (2012) around the time that Fleetwood started to become a force. Beauty or faith? That’s what he’s asking. FTFC need both, plus an assassin’s knife.