So if I understand correctly you are effectively suggesting I turn against ENIC because we failed to get top 4 in 2004, 2005, 2006 etc even though we’ve it many times much more recently? Sorry but that makes absolutely no sense to me – surely what we all wanted to see was progress, improvement, and maybe it did take a long time, maybe if you’d asked me 15 years ago I might have been less supportive of ENIC (though I doubt I’d have had such lofty expectations back then), I’ve no idea, but it would be crazy to wait until the improvement came, and THEN turn against them. By that logic, if we’d won a trophy in each of the last 3 years we’d still turn against ENIC for performance reasons because 4 trophies in 23 years isn’t enough. However I don’t expect you do mean that, I expect I'm misunderstanding you, and I do appreciate that I wasn’t clear on timeframe so…
…perhaps a good way would be to look at what has been achieved over a rolling 4 year period in the last say 5 iterations of that as a good indication of relatively recent performance. (I say rolling 4 years rather than 5 simply because my initial criteria was 2/3 of every 5 years, giving an average of 2.5, and obviously you can’t finish in the top 4 in 2.5 years of 5!
). So in the 4 years up to season ending in May:
2022: 2/4 = Success
2021: 2/4 = Success
2020: 3/4 = Success
2019: 4/4 = Success
2018: 3/4 = Success
I believe the last time we failed to finish top 4 in 2 of the last 4 seasons was 2016. For me that constitutes success. I’m aware that the exact calculation method used is obviously open to manipulation, anyone can move timeframes and windows etc to ‘prove’ anything, such is the nature of data, but for me the above is one valid interpretation. But in any case the precise ‘mechanics’ doesn’t really matter that much as even if we didn’t quite achieve what I expected but only nearly achieved it, I’d still not consider that grounds to want the owner to sell up – as I said as the beginning, all teams have their ups and downs, I’m comfortable with that.
I must say I’ve sort of lost track though of what we’re trying to achieve here – may I ask what you’re trying to achieve via this conversation from your side? Let’s re-cap to help determine whether or not what we’re doing is worthwhile:
- I wanted to see whether or not the arguments supportive of ENIC could be accepted / understood / empathised with by an intelligent ‘ENIC OUT’ supporter. I believe I have my answer to that question, so that bit was successful at least.
- If not, I hoped to find out the fundamental reasons why – I think I probably have that bit too.
- If I’m totally honest, of course deep down I wanted to convince you that there can be multiple arguments that can disagree with each other and yet all still be valid, and that the ENIC supporting argument is one of them. In this, clearly I have failed (but it’s not an objective I would have expected to succeed at so that’s ok).
What are you getting from this, if you don’t mind me asking?
- Are you hoping to learn something?
- Are you hoping to convince me that there simply is no valid argument supportive of ENIC?
- Are you hoping to influence anyone reading this conversation to gain support for your cause?
- Are you simply enjoying the debate?
I ask primarily because we’re now a long way from my ‘refereeing to ensure both sides see that the other has a list of points that makes sense in their heads, and can be articulated as such’ – we have moved now to me taking up a position as a player on the ENIC supporting side, defending individual assertions etc in detail. If that becomes the job of the referee, then how does it differ from the two sides simply debating between them? And as stated previously, I’m neither inclined nor equipped to play that role anyway – some of these discussions have happened hundreds of times over thousands of pages, I have no reason to believe that I can do anything to advance them or make any breakthroughs to enlighten us all, and I don’t (and never did) intend to try.
I’m going to leave this for the bank holiday weekend now, but should be able to pick it up again on Tuesday (at the latest) when I should have a bit more time available, if needed. Enjoy the rest of the weekend (and let’s hope tomorrow doesn’t leave any of us feeling depressed on Sunday evening… I don't know about you, but if I'm honest I probably detest the dippers more than I detest anyone else, even our traditional rivals, so even though the season seems pretty much ruined, beating them would still be a great one-off feeling for me personally - but winning aside, above all else let's just hope we see some fight
).
