Promotion 2017

As I write this I have to admit to having partaken in alcohol. Not that excessively, ‘tis true. I have to be up at stupid o’clock tomorrow so had to cut the evening short.

“Why might that be?” you may well ask.

Today Argyle sealed a promotion by way of a 6-1 thumping of Newport County and to honest we might have scored 10. I suppose a last minute winner might be better but this is pretty good.

Glory days don’t often come along to Argyle but today was definitely one of them. I’ve been going week in week out ever since I was a kid which is over 40 years now and I was there when we went up v Colchester in ’75, at Wembley in ’96, versus QPR in 2004 and today. In all that time only 4 promotions (there was a couple of others in 1986 and 2002 but I couldn’t make it to those games).

That is only the start of it though. As a club we’ve gone as close to disappearing as any and hung on. We’ve endured 6 years in the basement division  and only hung in there by the skin of our teeth on two occasions. Two years ago we failed in the play-offs. Last year we failed at Wembley. There’s been nothing to celebrate in any of those years other than our mere continuance and the disappointment has been crushing with last year’s Wembley capitulation a particularly gutless low despite the various calamities that had befallen us previously.

And now this…

The tsunami of joy, of celebration, of relief was like a force of nature at Home Park today: tangible; irrepressible. There was a vibrancy, an energy that simply must not be allowed to dissipate. We must build on this. It cannot be seen as an end to itself because, magnificent though it was, it is only a step on the journey.

But I don’t want to speculate about the future; I want to look back. Today’s team, management and owners will bask in the glory but that glory was only possible due to a level of dedication and sacrifice from a whole host of people: those who set up the Argyle Fans’ Trust with the very real intention of starting again from scratch somehow; the staff who went for months upaid; players (even if they were crap – and most of them were) who signed for us despite not knowing if they’d be paid or not – players who signed for us when nobody else would; Peter Reid for paying a heating bill; Carl Fletcher for keeping us up when all seemed lost; John Sheridan likewise; Vivien Pengelly (leader of Plymouth City Council at the time) for financing James Brent’s rescue package that allowed us to escape administration; everybody who put money into the club by chucking coins in buckets, buying season tickets when the next season wasn’t even likely to happen or buying merchandise they just didn’t need… Without them there would have been no Derek Adams; no glorious 6-1 promotion game; arguably no anything.

Argyle should never have been in this division and it should never have taken us 6 years to get out of it. Let us never forget how we ended up in “Division 4”; let us never take our eye off the ball and let us never allow it to happen again.

Today has been all kinds of wonderful and we’ve quite rightly celebrated the living daylights out of it but we must never, ever stoop so low again. The club, the fans, the city all deserve better than this and we should loudly, incessantly demand better.

No ifs, no buts, no excuses… this is not as good as it gets. All this is is a necessary stage that has to be gone through. We are nowhere near our glass ceiling, if such a thing exists at all; we must press on.

Greater glory awaits.