Can patience can be a virtue with Carlisle United players like Brennan Dickenson?

Have a little…patience. Not easy, is it, these days? Not when the sport you watch at the level you watch it increasingly functions on short-term deals, and if you haven’t done something Instagrammable or clippable today then do you really exist at all?

Dinzeyi and Young, two aspiring Carlisle United loan players from Premier League clubs, were talking about the “patience” they need as they bid to make Chris Beech’s first team at Brunton Park. I wonder, though, if it’s also something we need to remind ourselves on a broader basis, in spite of everything pushing our brains in the opposite direction.

This came to mind when thinking of another Blues player interviewed in the recent past. Brennan Dickenson, speaking after last Saturday’s 2-1 win over Salford City, was much fresher of face than a man of 28 years.

He beamed like an excited teenager. He had just scored his first goal at Brunton Park, more than 12 months after joining the club, and produced what most spectators will have felt to be his best performance in a United shirt.

Now, the reflex temptation faced with that is to ask: what kept you? The more measured judgement notes Dickenson’s first campaign was a largely rotten one on the injury front.

Yet another thought to drop into the blend is that, with some players, it genuinely doesn’t get going until they’ve been around for a while. What if he turns out to be one from that slow-burning category?

It’s easy to think of those players who had immediate impact at United – Jabo Ibehre, Lee Miller, Vincent Pericard from the relatively recent past – yet there are others whose first campaigns simply did not resemble what was in the brochure. Had judgement been quick and abrupt, history would have turned out quite differently.

By the end of 2016/17, a play-off season, there was one midfielder who accepted his individual efforts would have seen him released were it not for the fact he had another year on his contract.

Well, Jamie Devitt went on to achieve double-figure goal tallies in each of the next two campaigns and performed to the extent that, come his departure in 2019, it took plenty in the United fanbase a fair old while to get over it.

Jamie Devitt's first United campaign was a disappointment - but he went on to flourish (photo: Barbara Abbott)

Devitt was not a veteran but nor, in that first season, was he a kid dealing with basic early-career culture shock. It just didn’t run for him in those initial 12 months in Cumbria and it wasn’t until he steered home a goal at Colchester the following October that his true ability started to flourish.

Karl Hawley had a good initial spell in 2004/5 but by the end of the season was out of the team and not looking like a particularly sure thing in United’s attack. He found fresh resolve that summer and turned himself into a superb, predatory finisher thereafter.

Further back, we think of Steve Hayward as one of the Blues’ best midfielders of the 1990s, a Wembley-winning captain and driving force (who turned 50 this week, for heaven’s sake) yet it’s also the case that, in his first full campaign in Cumbria, there was talk of the £100,000 signing from Derby leaving on loan.

It might be a run of ill-fortune, it might be the wrong set of combinations at the wrong time, or it might just be the fact that, for reasons hard to define, adjustment as a Carlisle United player – whatever in the world that entails – can simply take a little more time.

It isn’t wrong to want returns quick. Contracts, after all, start at the start, not midway through. There is presently a degree of uncertainty among some about how Zach Clough is going to flourish at United, with many of the questions concerning the Blues' shape and style. It is fair to ask them, yet at the same time Clough has started two games for the Cumbrians.

Zach Clough, right (photo: Richard Parkes)

Dickenson has only just hit the 20-appearance mark, a tally which tells the story about his first season without needing to repeat the detail. Beech has so far given more interviews about the former Colchester man’s power than that power has translated into goals, but maybe that can now change.

In many ways he is an archetypal League Two player: a mid-age performer of known ability whose gifts have been whittled by injury yet whose CV is sound enough for a manager to think he can revive the best of him – accompanied, in Dickenson’s favour, by an optimistic personality and committed professional nature.

Visit a fourth-tier club of your choosing and you’ll find any number who fit that general description. It takes a precise combination of circumstances for such a player not just to come again but go past what he’s done before, yet there is no earthly reason why, with the right handling, conditioning and, yes, run of luck, the game in 2021 cannot propel a Brennan Dickenson afresh.

It was not the case that people were writing him off come this summer, more one or two instances where it was asked when United were going to get something for their outlay. The evidence last Saturday suggested this could be the campaign when he indeed occupies a more regular place, becomes important rather than incidental, makes up for lost time and achieves the momentum he was cruelly denied to begin with.

With some, it simply happens that way – and every so often it turns out worth the wait.