The City Curse

I have come up with a cast-iron method to ensure promotion. Within a couple of seasons we’ll be riding high in the Premiership and competing for European silverware to go alongside the Gloucestershire Cup, Anglo-Scottish Cup and Freight Rover Trophy in the boardroom. I absolutely guarantee it. The solution to all our problems is simple. No huge injection of cash. No star signings. No famous manager or ingenious tactics.

Scrap January.

Simple as that. What is it with January? It’s the same thing every bloody year. I cast my mind back ten or twenty years and it seems like we always flunk the first month of the new year, regardless of how impressive we have looked up until that date. It can’t be the personnel on the pitch. We were doing it back in the days of Glyn Riley and Alan Walsh. It defies management changes and boardroom reshuffles. We’ve had terrible Januaries under a whole string of bosses and chairmen. We usually pull out of it in February and then spend the whole of the rest of the season trying to make up the ground we lost out on in January.

There are some things that are a familiar and traditional part of watching football down Ashton Gate and have remained the same throughout living memory. Singing Drink Up Thy Zider. Putting up with dodgy pies. Getting your socks wet shuffling through that bloody great puddle in the alley between the Wedlock Stand and the car park whenever it rains. And knowing that you’re going to lose practically every game in January.

This season we went into New Year on a run of 19 games unbeaten. But as soon as the January curse cut in, we promptly lost three on the trot, careered out of the FA Cup and picked up a promotion-denting two league points from a possible 12. In fact the only win in six games came at Third Division Bournemouth in the LDV Vans Trophy. Suddenly, January is out of the way and we’ve lost two of the eight games since. We exited December coasting at second in the league table and entered February in a dodgy fifth.

But it’s not just this year. The January wobble is now an annual event down Ashton Gate.

Last year we went into January having won seven out of the previous eight games. Over the next month we lost at home to Northampton and suffered the 0-0 draw at Cambridge which saw the wheels begin to come off our season. It happens season after season.

In fact I’m so sad that I actually did a bit of research. In the past century, we’ve played 25 times on New Year’s Day. Of those, we’ve won five, drawn four and lost 16. So I’m not just imagining it. Since 1902, we have played a total of 462 games in January in all competitions. Of those, we have won just 162. If they were all league games with three points at stake, we would have averaged just 1.3 points a game.

Therefore, we can see that the reason for our years of underachieving at Ashton Gate is clear. It’s not the board, the managers or the players. The real culprit is Romulus – son of Mars, founder of the Roman empire and the inventor of the Roman calendar - for coming up with a stupid, lousy month called January.

So here’s the solution. We must all now join the campaign for a winter break. It’s nothing to do with concern for the players burning out, or risking injury on pitches frozen solid. It’s not because I hate losing the feeling in my toes as I stand on the crumbling terraces at some godforsaken northern mining town, or that I feel too hard-up to travel after splashing out on Christmas presents.

It’s just that if we could just get January banned from the footballing calendar I remain convinced that nothing will be able to stop our relentless drive to greatness.

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