Carlisle United takeover: short-term gains are needed first

Simpson, in his reply, mused on them all, and then reached the bottom line. What was the most critical part of the job, the slogan any boss must keep in mind before everything else?
“Bloody win,” Simpson said.

This blunt reality has been hammered like a nail into Simpson over a managerial career of variable experiences. For all his glories at Carlisle there were tougher times too. The way his reign at Preston North End came to an end, for one. Simpson now regrets trying to be an all-seeing-eye at Deepdale, overseeing academy developments and other departments rather than remaining of tunnel vision regarding the first team.

And so, as ever, he’s the man we ought to heed when thinking about this exciting new dawn at Carlisle today. Simpson, like the rest of us, wants United to grow. He wants a new training ground, other improved facilities, firmer foundations, a club swelling and flourishing for all time.

In this he is more than simply a manager. He’s also a director of football, if we are able to stomach that term again, and a strategist for the wider operation.

Yet he remains, first and foremost, the bloke who has to win some football matches. Without that, the landscape is never as sunny as you wish.

Take 2002. That was, and probably still is, the summer of greatest relief at Brunton Park concerning takeovers. Michael Knighton’s long goodbye was over after some disturbing and scarred latter years, and John Courtenay was finally at the helm.

Brunton Park was packed for the start of the John Courtenay era in 2002... (Image: News & Star)

July that year was a pivotal month in the club’s history. It was the time you stopped fretting so much about United’s very existence. For the opening game of the new season, some 10,684 showed up.

It appeared, and indeed was, a colourful and high-spirited demonstration of United’s potential. Courtenay must have looked at the crowd and felt he’d unwrapped the golden ticket.

Less than a month later, United hosted Rochdale. The visiting midfield included a couple of familiar faces, namely Ian Bishop and Paul Simpson, and the attendance was 4,501. That was on a Friday night, yet the next Saturday crowd was even lower: 3,623 for the visit of Boston United.

So, in the space of one month and 11 days, the Blues had lost two thirds of their support already. It was no coincidence that United, along the way, had lost seven of their first ten games, failed to score in five of them, and did not, it was plain, have the team to bless a new era with success.

For numbers to return in the way that was hoped for in the long campaign to oust Knighton, it took some of that: success. That second veteran Rochdale midfielder, once he took charge at Carlisle the following year, was the catalyst, building a more credible team which, over time, absorbed relegation, bounced back from it immediately and then in 2006 became League Two champions.

...but it took the work of Paul Simpson (pictured facing United with Rochdale in 2002) to oversee a sustained rise in support at Brunton Park (Image: News & Star)

That happened under new ownership too, that of Fred Story, yet nothing relaunched United as a vastly-supported club so much as success – bloody winning, as Simmo would put it.
Until this latest 2022-2023 uplift, that period – promotion, then early League One progress to 2008 – was the best modern spell for crowds at Carlisle. The club has always been graced with good support but serious numbers, over time, still need results to sustain them.

Things have not, it’s fair to say, wavered so far this season, nor do they look likely to any time soon. Carlisle’s astonishing revival under Simpson has reignited a fanbase and in spite of a struggle for victories so far in 2023/24, strong backing remains.

It now gets a rocket pack thanks to the Piatak takeover: its brightness, its smell of hope, its glint of modernity. This afternoon at Brunton Park should outstrip Courtenay’s beginning against Hartlepool United in terms of bums on seats and feet on terraces.

Whatever happens against Charlton Athletic, we should not see a sudden dip. Trust and admiration of Simpson, plus a place on a bandwagon towards an ambitious new future, is a cocktail many will wish to keep drinking from. 

Yet all things cease to be new eventually. There are few spirits so high that losing every week can not lower, no matter how good and bright the broader intentions are.

The Piataks, in the statement of their plans at the CUOSC members’ meeting in September (no doubt to be reiterated in detail now their takeover is over the line), have shown a positive handle on United’s needs.

They are in tune with Simpson’s ideas about training facilities. They have looked at Brunton Park and seen obvious grounds for freshening it up. The family are not, one imagines, going to sit on their hands when there are opportunities to make everything more colourful and high-aiming.

And all this is fundamental to growing the club, bringing it in line with all our dreams for it. Yet there is merit in obsessing on the here and now too – more than that, in fact.

Carlisle could not provide the team to match aspirations under Courtenay, whose reign was saddled with some of the financial legacy of Knighton’s years and whose initial choice of manager, Roddy Collins, was not in the same league as his second, Simpson.

Despite that summer of possibility, of relief, reality was hard when you watched a still-floundering team. In other words, whatever schemes are bursting to leap from the Americans’ notepad, don’t let them push past the most important thing right now.

It is to give us an XI, a squad, that can deliver foundations in a footballing sense, that can retain League One status (the "first and foremost" goal, Tom Piatak snr said yesterday). Don’t be shy about front-loading the initial spending onto the team.

Don’t give us the best training ground in League Two, or the best vision for a club whose team stays in decline. Give us short-term, short term, short term too. Bloody win.