How Far Do We Want To Go?

On the face of it it’s a silly question. Only one answer. “All the way to the very top.” And that has to be the way. If a football club isn’t striving to be the very best that it can be, and that means better than anybody else, then it isn’t doing its job. Equally it is fair to say that Argyle are absolutely light years away from that: currently we’re not even the best team in League 2. So that destination, if we can park the obvious fact that it is more or less completely unattainable for a moment or two, seems so distant that it may as well not exist.

That’s no excuse though. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Continuous improvement. Marginal gains. That’s the very least we can expect and in wilder flights of fancy we could see a whole paradigm shift such as that currently enjoyed by Bournemouth and, to a lesser extent Swansea and Burnley, as they ply their trade in what we are now supposed to call the English Premier League (EPL). After all if a club isn’t trying to win every game, every week and every trophy it enters then it should be. Whoever it is. That’s what it is for. What point is there being in a competition if you do not compete to win?

So let us assume, oh joy of all joys!, that that happens and a resurgent Argyle resurgams its way to hitherto unanticipated glory and that elusive EPL goal is scored and that the pipe dream of Argyle competing and winning at the very top becomes as common place as the old primula vulgaris is in our gardens, hedgerows and verges right now.

Consider the steps already taken, consider Rome rapidly built, consider further improvement unnecessary and consider gains no longer marginal but seismic; consider the paradigm to have permanently shifted.

Week after week Manchesters United and City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs arrive in town fearing for their once great reputations. Week after week we spank ‘em all and their worst fears are proven to be well-founded. Imagine that! (If you can.)

It’d be great, wouldn’t it! It’s exactly what I have hoped for for most of my life. The whole world would marvel and there’d be articles in Le Monde, the NYT, La Republicca and El Pais asking how we had done it and could it happen there. There’d be endless segues on Sky Sports News. We’d be first up on Match Of The Day every week. Hell! We’d be on MotD every week!! Think on that for a moment.

The question I am asking is: do we really want that? To which you might respond “why wouldn’t we?”

Well there’s a few reasons…

Difficult though it is to travel all over the country from Plymouth to wherever at least we can be fairly sure the game will take place at 3pm on a Saturday or 1945 on a Tuesday. That’d be gone if we were in the EPL with their massively variable kick-off times. Travelling to away games is difficult enough now but it would be worse once the paradigm has shifted.

Programmes. There’s another thing. £3 each they are now. Well not in the EPL they aren’t. More like £5 is common. That said we don’t have to buy them. Beer? £5/pint. Again we don’t have to buy it. Likewise the more expensive food on offer.

Entry costs. This is where it starts to get really worrying. £20 to get in could become £50. Can I afford that? No. My season ticket currently around £300 might be nearly £1000. Can I afford that? No. Putting it quite simply following Argyle would be too expensive for me. I wouldn’t be able to go. I wouldn’t be able to share in the moments I have spent almost 50 years yearning hopefully for and my seat would be sold to somebody else. Somebody who could afford it. Probably somebody with rather less time and emotion invested into the club’s fortunes than me. I’d be an Armchair Supporter no more likely to see my team play in the flesh than the Plymouth Reds/Blues/Gooners/Spurs/’Gers/Celts etc are. It’d be the Saturday lunchtime/Sunday afternoon trip to a pub with Sky/BT Sports for me. That’d be as good as it got.

And let’s be vaguely realistic here. Argyle wouldn’t be sweeping away all opposition before them in the EPL (Argyle in the EPL realistic? Just play along, please, if you can.) They’d be scrapping like dogs to avoid relegation. The title would still be impossibly distant. All we’d have to celebrate is getting the 40 or so points needed to stay up and having half an eye on the European qualification places. That’d be it and where’s the glory, where’s the excitement and where’s the fun in that? We’d be a  West Ham United, Stoke City or WBA – and, let’s face it, who aspires to being one of them?

So maybe, just maybe, striving for success for its own sake, striving for goal-driven success is a foolish aspiration. Maybe, just maybe, the true joy comes not from the destination but from the journey itself. We should be offering 100% balls-out commitment to get there in every aspect of everything that we do.

We should never be accepting of stasis and mediocrity because that way we will inevitably fall back, in comparison to others, and eventually know more dark days than sunny ones. We should celebrate the Good Days like billy-o when they come and demand rather more of them because we’ve been starved of them for far too long now.

So back to the original question “how far do we want to go?” the answer is “we’re going to try our damnedest to go all the way, baby!” and there is no need to add the caveats. Just let them rest undefined and unconsidered like the proverbial elephant in the sitting room.