There is life at Bloomfield Road yet as well as luck and pluck. Last but one in League One amid continuing efforts by supporters to wrest control of the club, Blackpool faced a first league derby against Fleetwood, upstart Fylde coast neighbours. The occasion invited further embarrassment but somehow they won with an early own-goal. Steven Pressley, Fleetwood’s manager, was entitled to disbelief. “We’ve lost a match in which they had no shot on target,” he said. Owen Oyston’s club got away with pillage.
Blackpool’s plight has been a running sore, if not disgrace, in the league for a while, briefly relieved when Ian Holloway led them to a season in the Premier League in 2010. Last season they propped up the Championship from September, won four games in all and an on-pitch protest by fans caused abandonment of their final match against Huddersfield at 0-0 in the 48th minute. The Football League let that score stand as the result and one point improved their average. If the fans had done it all season, 46 points and a level goal difference would have kept the club up instead of 20 points shy.
If Blackpool are on their uppers, Fleetwood are on the up. In 2004 Andy Pilley, a local businessman and fan, became involved and soon chairman. Six promotions in 10 years powered them into League One in May last year. In 2012 they restored historic Highbury, abandoned by Arsenal, to the list of league grounds, a few months after losing 5-1 there to Blackpool in the FA Cup, when Jamie Vardy was their scorer.
A dozen seasons ago Fleetwood’s average crowd was 134. Last season it was 3,521. The town’s population is 27,000. Blackpool’s is 142,000 with an average crowd of 10,928. Last season Fleetwood’s went up 25%, Blackpool’s down by 23%. Fifty seasons ago, when they finished second in the top tier three years after winning the Cup, they had 38,000 at Bloomfield Road for the visit of Wolves. Saturday’s 7,755 was their season’s best in numbers that suggest a consistently loyal core. The visitors’ quarters were packed while swaths of the rest were empty. Fleetwood have 2020 vision of the Championship and with each roll of the dice seem to find a ladder while Blackpool get the snakes. It cannot all be down to luck.
On Saturday, though, fortune favoured them in a match of oranges and lemons, courtesy of Fleetwood’s away colours. Outside the ground gales lashed the sea front that separates the towns by seven miles, stopping walkers in their tracks. With winds like this who needs a rollercoaster for screaming thrills? At Highbury Stadium, comparatively unprotected, play might have been a farce. Here the players made the best of an awkward job, with Blackpool, on the back of seven defeats running, meeting Fleetwood’s slicker approach work with numbers in defence and occasional charges on the break.
Such a break prefaced the goal. Nathan Pond, sole survivor from that Cup match, was almost undone by the wind earlier. This time the centre-back scuffed in Brad Pott’s cross. Between times Hayden White headed off the line a pot shot worthy of the name Joe Davis, one of Fleetwood’s wide supporters of David Ball, whose lob against Preston is up for Fifa’s Puskas Goal of the Year Award. In added first-half time Jack Redshaw should have capitalised on another mix-up in Fleetwood’s defence but shot high. At 5ft 5in and 10st 3lb he looked as likely to vanish over the Mortensen Stand as the ball nearly did.
After the interval Fleetwood regained the poise that the goal had disrupted but they could not create the unmissable chance. Nine shots on target exercised Dean Lyness in goal without extending him. “We showed solidarity in everything we did,” said Blackpool’s manager, Neil McDonald. “We stopped their crosses into our box.”
Saki once wrote of “the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster”. What a difference a couple of letters make. Through Blackpool’s playing and non-playing staff and fans the club preserves a pride and dignity as they wait for the shame to pass. The club’s motto is “Progress”. People may talk of bragging rights. For the moment Fleetwood, going about their business, retain those.
