Dead cat bounce
Why it should seem natural to compare
our team’s performance to a dead cat I cannot immediately tell. But, in for a euro,
in for a kilo, as they say, though please be assured that the cat is entirely imaginary
and bears no relationship to any living person – which unfortunately is probably why
the analogy occurred to me.
"Dead cat bounce" came from the New
York Stock Exchange and quickly established itself in the City of London. It refers to a
situation where the stock market crashes, losing hundreds of points in a few hours, to
reach an all-time low. Strangely but frequently, at the lowest point of the market, prices
will start to creep back up again, before giving up the attempt and flopping back to the
bottom. The point of the idea is that even a dead cat, if dropped from a great enough
height, can just make one small bounce back upwards. In football, the classic example is
the team which freefalls down the table all season until, once relegated, it wins its last
game. We can all think of examples.
To Turf Moor, for the Palace game and a
long-awaited lad’s day out. Nino, son of the owner of our local pub, is to join me
(always keep in with people who run pubs). As a Villa fan, he fancied seeing something in
claret and blue winning. On Friday night, over a lazy beer, he asked what the score was
going to be. 3-1 to Palace I said. Burnley’ll go behind in the first ten minutes,
pull level just before half time, then lose to two quick goals in the dying moments of the
match. Slightly better than half correct, wasn’t I?
9am next day and we were off up the M6, Nino
proving that another benefit from being in the licensed trade is the ability to conjure up
bacon sandwiches on demand. At Keele services, I stop to phone ahead to the third member
of our merry band, Bernie from Bolton, who we are to pick up en route somewhere near
Astley Green. Bernie, known as Bernie the Bolt-on after a dimly remembered 1970s ITV quiz
programme (Golden Shot, wasn’t it? The one with the crossbow and "Bernie, the
bolt"), had faxed through directions on where to meet him. Apart from not telling me
which junction of the M6 I should exit from, the road number I had to aim for was
uncertain. The fax muttered about traffic lights and roundabouts over a vague number of
miles; I had to turn right at an Elf petrol station. Bernie would be waiting in a pub (the
Grey Horse possibly, he thinks, or the Commoners Gill). No problem there, then.
By 11.15 we are on the A580, which seems about
right. Bernie phones me. He’s at the Farmers Arms. Thanks a bunch, Bernie. But he
knows me better than I know myself and five minutes later I swing unerringly into the pub
yard. At midday, we are parking in my usual spot, a couple of streets away from Turf Moor.
The weather is foul and gets fouler, gusting and
raining and generally making the pub a good place to be. We start a very short pub-crawl.
Someone decides we should eat, so we turn into a pub advertising pizza although why Nino,
who is half Italian and presumably knows what pizza ought to taste like, should risk it is
not obvious. Sorry, no food, but the beer is only £1.20 a pint so we hide our
disappointment. Why aren’t your prices that low, Nino? Because my beer’s better,
that’s why. Glad we got that sorted out.
Pub gaming machines have improved since my day.
I was always one for trivia machines and the one now on offer was a trivia machine like
I’d never seen before. You could choose your field of questions – sport, general
knowledge, music, etc. We chose erotica. Somehow, this segued into a "spot the
difference" game. You know, the sort of things kids do to kill time in airports
although I hope not quite like this one. Two almost identical pictures of scantily clad
young ladies and a touch screen to highlight the five differences. This is where age
tells. Nino, our youngest, spots the (what shall I call them?) more fleshly differences.
Bernie, pushing 40 now, picks out subtle distinctions between the underwear and earrings
(Bernie the basque?). I, unfortunately much the oldest, notice that the chair has a leg
missing.
By the time we reach the upper echelons of the
Longside (sorry, James Hargreaves), it is pie time. We are by then so hungry that we have
two of everything and feel somewhat bloated. And finally, the match.
Others will report that much better than I can.
For the first ten minutes Palace were all over us, as if we’d forgotten that the ref
had started the game. Then, without it being apparent quite why, we woke up and Cook
scored. It became clear that Palace’s defence was nervous in the extreme, incapable
of coping reliably with any attack we might mount. But, we couldn’t mount any.
We’d get to the last third of the pitch and then break down. It was not Palace
repulsing us; it was us failing to get through. Payton was at his most anonymous and
should have been subbed that half. Was he carrying an injury?
In the second half we were better but, although
we launched repeated furious attacks we failed to get near enough to convert most of them
into chances, or to take the few genuine chances we made. Meanwhile, the feeling was
growing that Palace, who were far less active but much more controlled, could actually get
something out of the game. Even then, though, it was us gifting them two stupid goals
rather than Palace taking them on merit. Throughout all this, the crowd seemed mute,
raising its voice mainly to get cross. Plainly the course of the game was as predictable
to them as to me. The gate, too, was lower than I’d expected (14,900) which suggested
a certain pessimism. Perhaps the one bright spot was that the team kept on trying to
attack. Our man of the match should have been Glen Little, who is one of the few members
of the squad who seems to read play and anticipate it.
Programme moans. The oddest thing is that the
front cover nowhere says First Division on it. Indeed, by advertising itself as Division
Two Programme of the Year, it invites confusion. Then there is Stan’s column, one of
the shortest and blandest I have ever seen. Don’t give up your day job, Stan. He
refers to the win against Barnsley as getting back on track but, clearly, that was just
our dead cat bounce. Worse, he describes the loss to Crewe as a bit of misfortune and one
of the most one-sided games he’s ever been involved with. Well, sorry Stan: losing
4-2 and giving away two penalties suggests that Crewe outplayed us completely.
More to the point, the article by Chief
Executive Andrew Watson makes it clear that no more than one more purchase is envisaged,
and we are not going to try to spend our way out of trouble. Good. Finally, I could really
do without Alastair Campbell’s New Labour name-dropping. Every business wants to
cuddle up to those in power, and Bob Lord with his wooing of Ted Heath and Field Marshall
Montgomery was no exception, but at least I don’t recall that The Grocer wrote
programme notes.
Despite the result, though, it was an evocative
afternoon for my guests. The rain swirled around, the serried ranks of glistening slate
roofs spoke of a bygone era, and the Bob Lord stand looked tiny (remember when it looked
big, all those years ago?). We felt we’d been to a proper match.
For some happy reason, traffic was light on the
return journey and we arrived home as early as 10 to 8. At 8pm the lights went out, one of
the routine power cuts to which my village is prone. There are only two things to do in a
power cut. One causes a baby boom nine months later. I chose the other and, as I had done
a few hours earlier on the trivia machine, groped my way around the furniture looking for
light.
We have just lost to Grimsby – like Palace,
well below us – and tonight I fear we are going to loose to Fulham. Now, finally, we
will not be able to hang on to 10th place, but will slide slowly and
unceremoniously off the mudflats and out into the North Sea.
And I’m wrong! Gloriously and deliciously
wrong! Fulham may be our second dead cat bounce, but as a game it is second only to the
Tranmere-Southampton stunner as the story of the night. Or, on second thoughts, let
Huddersfield on Saturday show if we have actually got our paws back into the Kit-e-kat.
Meanwhile the radio informs me that, in Sri Lanka, the England cricketers are apparently
playing a Bored President’s Eleven. Always thought it was a game that dragged on a
bit too long.
Thanks to Steve Davis, we do beat Huddersfield,
though not very convincingly and at least retain 10th spot. The March fixture
list looks capable of yielding a few points if we have really managed to arrest freefall,
but in April we play all the promotion candidates in the worst of all possible runs-in.
But after Fulham, nothing is impossible, oh me of little faith. Lead me to the sardines
and cream of the play-offs; there’s life in the old cat yet!
Chris Down
March 2001
