Notes from the Habbin: Au revoir et Bonn chance
I'm not crying, you're crying.
Welcome back to the newsletter which, like United’s form, has been MIA since the end of September. Let’s begin with some of my favourite moments in 30-ish years of supporting the mighty U’s.
Booting my sofa in gleeful celebration as Paul Mullin blasted in a late winner in an otherwise uneventful lockdown game against Walsall
“JOE IRONSIDE PUTS CAMBRIDGE IN FRONT AND THE CUP UPSET IS ON”
On the pitch after Forest Green
It’s quite remarkable that all those moments have happened in less than three years, not least because the preceding four years passed by with so little incident; I challenge you to recall more than one or two games from the combined Shaun Derry/Joe Dunne/Colin Calderwood eras - I know, you’re thinking of Accrington at home under Derry and then, er, yeah, then it gets difficult.
The man who took one of the most unmemorable teams in United history and turned it - almost overnight - into one of the most memorable is of course Mark Bonner, who today finds himself out of a job having been fired on Wednesday morning.
Tributes to Bonner have flowed fulsomely from all parts of the football world, but I think that despite this, the sheer mentalness of his story and achievements is still taken a bit for granted by our fans. As a Cambridge United supporter you don’t usually get that many landmark moments in a such a short space of time, especially not being masterminded by a guy who is literally a season ticket holder made good. That he has achieved all he has in his first job as a manager, against the backdrop of the pandemic and all the other stuff that came with that, is even more to his credit.
Personally, I was feeling pretty ambivalent towards late-era Calderwood CUFC, to the extent that I couldn’t be bothered to get on my bike and pedal across town to watch his last game in charge - a dismal 4-0 defeat to Salford in January 2020. Despite recent events, things feel a lot different three years on - we have a club that we can be proud of and much of that is down to Bonner.
Indeed, to me it feels like whoever comes next (more on that in a moment) can’t be anything but a step down from the unique thing that we’ve given up, despite there being some pretty impressive names on the market.
Was it the right time for him to go? I still had faith he could turn it around and would’ve given him a bit longer, but the signs were pretty bad, coming off the back of a season which was also, to put it mildly, pretty bad. United managers often get fired after dismal midweek performances at the Abbey - think Calderwood and Salford, Richard Money and Bristol Rovers, Jez George and Kidderminster (though unsure if you can fire yourself) and, going back further, Rob Newman and Exeter - and the defeat to Lincoln had all the sad hallmarks of one of these occasions, with its soft penalty, deflected second goal and generally lackadaisical response to being behind. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong, and Bonner himself even seemed to know the game was up by making a very un-Bonner-like five changes to his starting line-up, all to no avail.
So yeah, I understand the reasons and the timing - despite the recent dismal form our league position is still decent and the new manager will have a month to get their feet under the table and look at the squad before the transfer window opens. They will also be facing a run of fixtures where the expectation of us picking up a load of points is pretty low, with tricky away games against the likes of Charlton and Oxford (and, er, Stevenage) on the docket.
But I also think that anyone who can confidently say this is the right decision is kidding themselves a bit. We might select the manager who can take us to the next level, and things might get even better from here, but history also tells that most Cambridge United managerial appointments are bad ones.
Next Cambridge United manager?
Who comes next? Well the prevailing theory seems to be that someone more experienced is needed to get best out of a squad which itself has played a lot of football at this level and above.
I’m not so sure this is the case, and appointing someone with a lot of games under their belt would certainly buck the trend across the EFL of the last couple of years which has seen clubs go for managers with coaching pedigree (think Rob Edwards when he got the Forest Green job, Kieran McKenna at Ipswich, etc) rather than years of managerial experience. This is perhaps part of the reason why so many managers with decent CVs - Danny Cowley, Neil Harris, Gareth Ainsworth, Matt Taylor - feel within reach for us this time.
Whichever way the club goes, this is a massive decision and the choice of manager needs to be the right one. I can see why the board has acted now, but we shouldn’t be under any illusions that this is not a gamble which could easily go wrong, and one that could see the good work of the last three years unravel pretty quickly.