Age of Austerity at the Gate..

Good article by Andy Stockhausen...

If Bristol City’s management and playing staff needed a reminder that they are living through an age of austerity, it was provided by last week’s jaunt to Port Vale.

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Highly paid players such as Neil Kilkenny will soon be a thing of the past as Bristol City cut their cloth accordingly in League One.

Hitherto accustomed to having an evening meal on an overnight trip, City’s players were informed the budget would no longer extend to such an extravagance.

Instead of leaving at lunchtime on Friday as they would have done in previous seasons, they delayed their departure until 7pm and, upon arrival at a Stoke-on-Trent hotel some three hours later, partook of a modest repast of soup and sandwiches before retiring to their rooms. By denying the travelling party a square meal, the football club made a financial saving of around £500.

My point in mentioning this is not to bellyache on behalf of professional footballers who are pampered to an extent the vast majority of we lesser mortals can only dream about, but to make a point regarding the state of the finances at Bristol City these days.

Last weekend’s exercise in penny-pinching is symptomatic of what has been going on inside Ashton Gate for much of this year. Having chucked suitcases of hard cash into backing his sporting passion and seen precious little return for his money, majority shareholder Steve Lansdown has announced a fundamental change of direction.

Let there be no doubt among City fans as to what the club’s five pillars policy means in actual fact; it represents, among other things, a purge on waste and excess, one that is being pursued with an almost religious zeal.

A wage bill that peaked at £18.6 million just two years ago has already been halved and will be further reduced when the likes of Marvin Elliott, Stephen Pearson, Neil Kilkenny and Liam Fontaine are finally out of contract.

Staff within Ashton Gate Ltd have also felt the squeeze, around one fifth of their number being made redundant in a radical pruning exercise in 2012.

Of course, austerity on such a scale is bound to have an adverse effect upon the product on the pitch.

Players having to sacrifice the occasional meal and overnight stay is neither here nor there, I hear you say. But when wider cutbacks force head coach Sean O’Driscoll and director of football Keith Bert to operate within the confines of a financial straightjacket, there are direct consequences for you, the supporters.

City fans were given a tantalising glimpse of what might have been when Peterborough United striker Britt Assombalonga destroyed the Robins’ defence in a League One encounter at Ashton Gate earlier this season.

Courted by Bert and O’Driscoll at one stage in the summer, the youngster could quite easily have found his way to Ashton Gate on loan. That is, until Posh offered Watford £1 million up front for the forward. At that point, City were out of the running, unable to compete on an equal financial footing with Peterborough, a club perceived as significantly smaller by a majority of Robins fans.

It was a similar story when O’Driscoll made public his requirement for an experienced centre half to replace the injured James O’Connor only last month. Offered 29-year-old Egypt international Jimmy El Abd by Brighton & Hove Albion, he instead took Lewis Dunk, another young player still cutting his teeth in first team football.

Commendable as it is and already in operation at many lower league clubs, City’s new financial model is having a direct effect on performance and results. I’m not for one moment suggesting the club return to its previous strategy of spending beyond its means, but it is important those who follow the Robins and care for the club understand what is going on.

This is not the Bristol City of the Gary Johnson era; it is not even the Bristol City of Derek McInnes, who was required to start the cost cutting before losing his job in January this year. This is an altogether different Bristol City.

And this leads me onto my next point. Bristol City in its current guise has become so closely associated with head coach O’Driscoll that it is easy to fool oneself into believing the policy of financial prudence is his own.

This is patently untrue. City’s board of directors, prompted by owner Steve Lansdown, themselves took the quantum leap towards austerity earlier this year. They then hired O’Driscoll to implement their new way of doing things.

Owing to an inexplicable reluctance to communicate with supporters on the part of the board, the head coach has unfortunately become a lone voice in explaining a manifesto that was actually drafted by others.

Left on his own to front up to the media and explain things in painstaking fashion in his extensive programme notes, the Midlander is beginning to sound like a broken record.

At what point will the Ashton Gate board break their self-imposed silence and, if not back the head coach, at least explain to supporters why it is they have elected to pursue a long-term strategy of cost-cutting that could even endanger the club’s League One status?

I for one, am certainly not holding my breath. Since his appointment as chairman nearly 18 months ago, Keith Dawe has scarcely made a public utterance, while vice chairman Jon Lansdown has receded into the background after initially being groomed as the board member with responsibility for dealing with the media.

New chief executive Doug Harman is eminently qualified to talk about off-pitch matters and has begun doing so via his programme notes. But what of the men who have, until recently, been charged with the task of directing football matters?

Of course, frustrated supporters are quite within their rights to question the head coach when results are poor and the one certainty in all of this is that O’Driscoll will, sooner or later, part company with the club.

Football is a result-driven industry and the buck inevitably stops with the manager whenever on-field achievements fall beneath expectations. But it does not necessarily follow that he should be left on his own to wage the never ending battle to win hearts and minds and convince supporters of the importance of adhering to a policy laid down by others.


http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/BRISTO...hitting-home/story-19921424-detail/story.html