The Championship: How on earth did Millwall survive in 2013-14?

By Tom Simmonds. There’s an episode of the classic 1980’s student sitcom The Young Ones where a man dressed as Buddy Holly falls upside down through the ceiling, surprising the character Mike, who exclaims: “Buddy Holly?! I thought you were dead!” ‘Buddy’ then proceeds to play an unreleased song, which has Mike calculating how much he can make from its sales and his miraculous comeback tour. Fast forward to London SE16 at the end of the 2013/14 football season, replace Mike with pretty much anybody who has watched Millwall this season, and put that second sentence in any one of our mouths. 

Life imitating art. The unfit, dissolute, failing squad which Steve Lomas assembled over the summer, took no time at all to turn toxic on him once it was apparent that Lomas was a man chronically out of his depth. The shipwrecked were dragged off the ocean floor, into a lifeboat, given a quick Heimlich manoeuvre before a beer was stuffed in their mitt to welcome them back to Championship dry land. How did this happen? I’m not so sure myself, but I’ll have a go at trying to explain it…

1 | Poor Opposition

We’ll get the not so positive one out of the way first.

There were some dreadful teams in the 2013/14 Championship. A basic indicator of this is that the fourth bottom side (Birmingham) only needed 45 points to stay up this season, as opposed to the 55 Points that Barnsley needed to finish 21^st in 2012/13. 50 points is generally enough to survive in any of the three Football League divisions. You need to go as high up as 18^th placed Charlton to find a team with over 50 points this season. A Blackpool side that won two games out of the last 25 played has finished 20^th this time out.

In truth, we Millwall fans knew that we’d be relying on the ineptitude of others for a while. For me, it was a dreadful game against Barnsley in late November which convinced me of this. A match that deserved no result other than a 0-0 draw was turned in our favour by a wonderful header into his own net by Scott Wiseman, on a high from making his international debut for Gibraltar the previous week. This gave me hope that there might just be three teams worse than we were.

My confidence in this straw I was clutching wavered heavily at times, but I’m happy to say that my judgement made on the basis of a game that people had forgotten about as soon as it had finished was borne out, and then some!

 

2 | Stuck in the middle with you

The Millwall team under Steve Lomas had a problem with conceding goals. A very big problem.

By the time Lomas was sacked after a 4-0 Boxing Day surrender to a Watford side without a win in 11, we had conceded 46 league goals in 22 games. While Ian Holloway shored this up a little after his appointment, we’ve still had our moments of frailty.

The definitive one came against in a 2-3 loss to Birmingham at The Den in late March. Right-back and club stalwart Alan Dunne got such a chasing from on-loan Liverpool wonderkid Jordan Ibe in the first half, he had to be moved to left-back to protect him from any further humiliation. When Dunne was subbed at half-time, I honestly wondered if he had played his last game for us.

Then Holloway tapped (possibly unconsciously) into a Millwall tradition that has served our full-backs well previously, moving Dunne into the centre of defence for the away game at Forest the following Saturday. He has not looked back, just as Colin Cooper didn’t after Mick McCarthy moved the left back into the centre in 1992, thus making him into the best centre-back I have ever seen play for Millwall and a fine Premier League centre-back for many years. Just like Matt Lawrence in 2003 after Mark McGhee moved him into the centre, away from the mutterings about his performances on the right. He was captaining Millwall in the FA Cup final less than 18 months later.

Dunne’s experience and organisational ability has made him a revelation at the heart of the defence. Millwall didn’t lose any of the seven games he played there, keeping three clean sheets in the process. That run of form has ultimately propelled us to safety.

 

3 | Carlos Edwards

A fanbase turned cynical by a number of ineffectual loan signings made by Lomas earlier in the season (the earnest, but physically spent Shaun Derry and the immobile Guy Moussi) and Holloway (the non-scoring strikers DJ Campbell and Simeon Jackson) meant there was much grizzling at the signing of a 35-year-old who Ipswich deemed surplus to requirements.

Carlos Edwards hasn’t just silenced the doubters, his accomplished performances have lent him a messianic quality among the Den faithful. Still exceptionally fit despite his advancing years, Edwards immediately showed the touch of a man good enough to have earned 86 international caps. His poise, energy and positive running on the right flank balanced up that side of the pitch, where the yawning gap caused by James Henry’s departure for Wolves was finally plugged.

Edwards’ winning goal in the 1-0 win at Wigan in early April also continued the momentum that a win at Forest three days prior had engendered. If Millwall do not sign Edwards permanently this summer, the natives will not be amused.

 

4 | Men of the Left

In the season where we sadly said goodbye to The Den’s own man of the left, Bob Crow, it is somehow fitting that the left side of the Millwall team features two lovely stories of redemption.

Scott Malone and Martyn Woolford finished second and third respectively in the fans’ player of the year vote this season. Neither man looked as if they had a future at the club at the end of the 2012/13 campaign.

Malone arrived from Bournemouth in summer 2012 for a big transfer fee (reportedly £750K) and not only with a reputation as an attacking full-back, but also a lad about town. A number of ill-advised tweets, coupled with a startling lack of regard for basic defending quickly put him in the ‘not sure’ box in the eyes of a lot of Millwall fans.

Woolford, a January 2013 transfer deadline day signing from Bristol City, who we all knew as the man who scored the winner against us for Scunthorpe in the 2009 League One play-off final, had difficultly settling in. Accusations of us having signed a winger with no tricks and no pace were commonplace at The Den as the realities of our post-Chris Wood team began to bite us hard.

Both players have proved their doubters completely wrong this term. Woolford’s sure touch, direct running style and his courage (he never hides and always wants the ball) have seen him crowned top scorer this season with 10 goals, five of which were directly responsible for nine of the 48 points earnt. Malone, while still suspect defensively at times, has harnessed his athleticism to turn himself into a genuine devil-may-care, overlapping threat. His final ball is also greatly improved, and nobody questions the fee paid for him now.

 

5 | Ian Holloway

I admit it. I was far from convinced that Holloway could do anything to keep us up, particularly in late March when, after a 2-2 home draw with Blackburn, we had won just twice in the 15 games he had been in charge.

This neglected the work that Holloway was doing to address the spine of the team. The tidy central midfielder Shaun Williams, signed from MK Dons on deadline day, was beginning to emerge as a genuinely authoritative presence in midfield. Nicky Bailey, after returning from injury in early April, went from the unfit backseat driver of Lomas’ teams to the player we always knew he could be under Holloway. Mark Beevers, a centre-back who was outstanding under Jackett, but a gibbering wreck under Lomas, regained the no-nonsense assurance that endeared him to us in his early days at the club. The ever-solid David Forde in goal seemed to thrive on Holloway’s ‘build ‘em up’ way of talking about players publicly, and continued to produce performances befitting a first choice international keeper.

This new found solidity, which Holloway was quietly implementing amid the white noise of his media interactions, was the foundation for the eight game unbeaten run, which ultimately saw us safe. Yes, he is prone to making odd decisions at times, but this should not detract from his grasp of the games’ basics, as well as his trust in them. All clearly demonstrated towards the end of this frankly, horrible, season for Millwall fans.

We thought we were dead. So did everybody else. Bring on the new material and get set for the comeback tour – it’s time to celebrate this new lease of life!

Millwall fans – what do you think kept your club up? Where can the Lions go from here in 2014/15? Will Carlos Edwards stay?

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