The reaction I've seen and heard from some of our supporters this season has left me absolutely dumbfounded.
Some of the comments from our fans recently have beggared belief. A seemingly growing number of fans appear to be falling into this group, where sub-standard performances are met with total distain, with booing becoming an increasingly common sound, whether at halftime or at fulltime.
It seems to me that people have abandoned reality and appear to be living in some sort of dream world, where Gillingham are a big club and opposing teams should be turned over with relative ease, brushed aside by a tide of sweeping, attacking football. Goals will be plentiful, while at the back, we'll keep clean sheets week after week.
That's what everybody would love to see, of course, but here's the thing - we're never going to deliver that. At least not regularly, anyway. I think people need to wake up, smell the coffee and get back to reality.
Football is a meritocracy. Teams win games by scoring goals, and win league points by winning games. The best teams do well, the worst ones do badly. Then there's promotion and relegation. In the 92-club system of professional football in this country, Gillingham are one of the nation's minnows. Forget buzzwords like "catchment area", "potential" and the like, Gillingham FC is a poorly supported team, playing in a poor division.
We don't have the finances, we don't have the support, and being in League Two, we don't have the quality in our squad to produce highlight-reel performances each and every week.
Yet some of our fans just don't seem to get it. Take this weekend's match for example. We played poorly, against another side that played poorly, but despite this we were still the dominant side and claimed a deserved, if mind-numbingly drab 1-0 win, thanks to an own goal. If the club release an end-of-season DVD next summer, it's fair to say not a lot of footage would be taken from Saturday's game. Indeed, a chap sat four or five seats along from me slept through most of the game, and my missus missed the goal because she was reading the ingredients on her water bottle (considering the list of ingredients pretty much started and finished with "water", you can see how bored she was!).
But on our way out, Mrs H wasn't scathing in her assessment. Other than being miffed at missing the goal (I pointed out it was no classic) she commented that if we can play that badly and still win games, then this division really isn't very good. And she's dead right.
So far this season we've seen the team booed off the pitch at home (either at halftime or fulltime) on more than one occasion, and we've received a 7-0 tonking at the hands of Shrewsbury, but we're sitting in eighth position in the league, only out of the playoff positions on goal difference. Now if we can be that close to the promotion and playoff places, surely things can't be all that bad?
But that doesn't stop people moaning. Why?
Perhaps some of them are "new" fans, who only started following the club since our successes of the late 1990s, and haven't experienced life in the basement division before.
Maybe some of them are simply out of patience after seeing the club firstly succeed, then fail repeatedly as it fell back down the footballing ladder.
And possibly some of them have simply decided that we should somehow have a divine right to be in a higher division and should be putting these supposed "minnows" to the sword week-in, week-out.
If fans are expecting better, then I'm afraid they're living in a dream world and they need to face a few facts:
- We're in League Two because we weren't good enough for League One
- We're not slaughtering everyone in sight in League Two because our team is competitive, but not outstanding, at League Two level
- We don't have a right to be in a higher division because we haven't earned that right
- We won't play amazing football week-in, week-out because our players aren't top-class performers. If they were, they'd be playing at a better club, and in a higher division
I think that some of our fans need to find a little perspective. The quality of football is worse because we're in a worse division. But look at it in context. Despite the overall drop in quality, the results are actually better. Much better in fact. The performances might not inspire us every week, but the key thing first and foremost is to win matches - and however duff the game was, we won it. It wasn't all that long ago that we used to lose games exactly like that. But this time around we're winning them, and long may that continue.
We're in eighth, and we're barely out of second gear. We haven't hit form yet, but we're well in contention. Rather than slagging off the team and the manager, look at the situation and get behind them - it might actually help. Booing, moaning and criticising as a result of unrealistic expectations is totally pointless and counter-productive.
As I said at the top of the article, my views here might not go down well with some people, but there you go. The groans whenever a pass goes astray, the morons who scream abuse at our own players during the game, the boos whenever the team isn't playing that well, the abuse thrown at the manager when he walks down the touchline after a sub-par performance. None of it helps, none of it is constructive, and as far as I'm concerned, none of it is supporting the team.
Imagine if you had a son or daughter playing in a team. You'd support them wouldn't you? You wouldn't groan at a misplaced pass, you'd encourage them. That's what we need more of at Priestfield. Yes, they're professional players, but none of them are the finished article, and therefore would surely benefit more from positive encouragement rather than groans of negativity. Unfortunately there's too much of the latter around our club at the moment, and it's counter-productive.
I'm not advocating blind faith, that's equally as daft, but what I am advocating is supporting the team. Encouraging players to be their best, not knocking them down when they're not. Five and a half thousand people ALL showing the team that we're on their side would make a massive difference. Remember the atmosphere generated by Wolfie's call for a "Twelfth Man" a couple of seasons ago? That day the fans took responsibility and created an atmosphere that helped push an underperforming Gillingham to a superb win against a high-flying Wigan side. We need a bit more of that.
Sometimes it's far too easy to criticise the team and the manager, but as fans, we're a significant part of the fortunes of Gillingham FC. At times, I think we're just as guilty of underperforming.
If we took responsibility a bit more often and backed the team from the very start, surely that's going to produce better performances, not to mention a better atmosphere, than what we have now.
It seems to me that too many people inside Priestfield turn up and demand to be entertained. Those people aren't fans in my eyes, they're simply spectators. I'm not writing this to somehow try and tell people how to support their team, it's up to them what they do. I just wish more of those spectators became 'proper' fans and supported the team a bit more, because that's what fans do - they support their team.
If they did, we'd see a major improvement, both in the stands and on the pitch. I'm pretty sure the management of the team would agree, too.