A treatise on our puzzling form

First published December 2005-ish

Once upon a time, our stadium was known as Fortress Longman: impervious to attack from visiting teams, who invariably struggled to win at our ground. Now it seems the opposite is true. We've won once at home since April, the vast, VAST majority of our points this season being earned on the road. Not only that, but home performances have tended towards mediocre, whereas our away form is red hot and other teams are beginning to dread a visit from us. The question everyone is asking is WHY?

One theory that has been put around by some (well, by Craig Brewster) is that there's more pressure at home from the fans. Fans watching a home game expect more attacking football and apparently put more pressure on the players to provide it. And birds go "tweet"!! I always thought it was pretty self-explanatory that home fans expect more, given that their team is playing at home, which is supposed to provide more of a feeling of security. It's not unreasonable for home fans to expect good home form, now is it?

Another theory is connected with the size of our pitch. Caledonian Stadium has one of the biggest playing surfaces in Britain and the pitch is currently marked out so that the sidelines go nearly all the way to the edge. This means a huge wide expanse of grass that the players have to run around on for 90 minutes. This is apparently knackering our players when they have to play at home and some believe that this effect may be behind our dodgy home form. There are two big holes in this idea. Firstly, if the size of the pitch is causing exhaustion for those who play on it, why does this not seem to affect the away team very often? Hmmm... Second, what on earth are our players doing in training all week if playing for 90 minutes on our pitch exhausts them? Very odd.

There doesn't seem to be a simple solution to our odd form. You would hope, however, that it gets sorted out double quick. Not being able to win at home is embarrassing, and good away form can't be relied upon to last for a whole season. Otherwise, if we can't find a solution, our only option will be to move back to Pittodrie...

Similar articles:

More comment

More archived articles