Neville Dalton is a journalist and a Portsmouth fan of more than 40 years.
I made the mistake of tweeting on Saturday night that Pompey were facing a fight against relegation this season.
It was a mistake not because I don’t think it will happen – I do – but because I posted my view just a few hours after another defeat for our ailing club.
As I have preached before, you should not make wholesale judgments about how bad – or indeed good – a team is on the basis of individual games, or on their prospects based on the first couple of matches in such a long season.
As regular readers of this site will know, I had formed my view on what lay ahead of Pompey this season before the first ball was kicked in anger.
And yes – it wasn’t particularly optimistic, based on the quality and quantity of personnel available to Steve Cotterill and the prospects of that situation improving.
But it was no knee-jerk reaction to two worrying defeats and a last-gasp draw whose dramatic nature masked, I believe, the inadequacies of the performance.
In my own defence, my tweet on Saturday was a follow-up to one I had posted the previous night – before the Brighton game – in which I suggested that result could be an indication of how our season was likely to pan out.
In other words, we needed the draw at Middlesbrough to be the catalyst for progress rather than for the home defeat against Barnet to shape the way things were heading.
The fact that Pompey lost at home yet again to a more-than adequate – but hardly all-conquering – Brighton side has cast a die that will be hard to change.
Losing – as winning – is habit-forming. And it’s the sort of habit we’ve been very good at developing at the start of recent seasons.
But I certainly didn’t want to create the impression that my fears for the season were based on a one-goal defeat against the Seagulls.
In fact, I’m not complaining at all that we face – in my opinion – another tough year of struggle.
As I acknowledged in my season preview, we’re still the victims of circumstances.
Refreshingly honest
We don’t appear to have owners with bottomless pockets – or at least, not ones who are prepared to indulge Pompey in that manner.
And after the tribulations of recent seasons that may not be a bad thing.
It’s just that we do need to come to terms with that and accept that it will have an effect on how we fare.
As a manager Cotterill has good and not-so-good characteristics. I’m an admirer of what he achieved in such difficult circumstances last season, including the football we played for a short while mid-way through it.
I think he’s refreshingly honest and a decent motivator.
His signing policy remains an enigma.
Last season produced more failures than successes, but given the constraints he endured, that’s not surprising.
This time round it’s still too early to say. Even the wisdom of the warmly welcomed re-signing of Benjani Mwaruwari remains in question until and unless one of my favourite Pompey players of all time proves his fitness.
And we know Cotterill is still facing all sorts of obstacles that meant he joined the transfer window later than he would have liked, and armed with rather less cash than he would have wished for, too.
But one thing that was again abundantly clear against Brighton is that once more we are heading for disciplinary Armageddon with the way his teams play the game.
Take off your blue specs for a minute. Pompey are not nice to watch.
I’m sure he would argue they’re not nice to play against, either, which is probably the idea.
But fans, players and management should stop looking to blame others for our foul- and card count.
The responsibility is Pompey’s alone. And it’s not pleasant.
I had hoped we would have learnt from last season’s appalling showing, where we amassed nine red cards and not far short of 100 bookings at very nearly two per game.
Three games into a new era and what’s the score?
No red cards (though one or two players went perilously close on Saturday), but 58 fouls – including 23 in the Brighton game alone – and 13 bookings, which works out at an appalling 4.3 yellows per game, already more than twice last year’s embarrassing tally.
Benefit of the doubt
And don’t blame the ref – yes, he made a couple of mistakes in the Brighton game but he got a lot more right than wrong (as the officials usually do).
And to be honest, if I had the likes of Lawrence, Mullins and Kitson in my ear all game, I might be averse to giving them the benefit of the doubt, too.
It was no coincidence that we amassed such dismal totals against our south-coast rivals.
Try as we might, few of us will forget our ordeal at the Withdean last January when we had no fewer than seven bookings – as well as the early sending-off of David Kitson – in our 3-1 FA Cup defeat.
So, new season, new start. A chance to put things right in our first home fixture of the 2011-12 season?
Not on your nelly. Here’s what our captain – yes, the on-field representative of our club – Liam Lawrence had to say before the match.
In a story in The News, headlined “Lawrence: We have a score to settle”, he declared: “We had the Cup game and we had 10 men for most of the game but we owe them one.
“They were being clever. There were a lot of bookings. There will probably be a few more this time!”
No prizes for guessing who was among the bookings in the score-settling rematch, then.
Pompey’s behaviour was pretty poor once again, but more than that, with a squad the size of Pompey’s it was irresponsible.
Joel Ward, Greg Halford, Hermann Hreidarsson and Tal Ben-Haim have each already been booked twice in the opening three fixtures, with serial offenders like Lawrence, Kitson and Aaron Mokoena off the mark, too.
Pre-Christmas suspensions beckon, which with Pompey’s squad size creates an immediate handicap, the like of which clearly affected our results – and ultimate position – last season.
Who knows how many points it might cost us this time around?
To be honest, our job was already going to be difficult this season.
We could do without our players’ inability to control themselves compounding the problem.