Mistakes yes... but Tardif deserves fair run at job in testing times

So if this paper’s greatest football correspondent had to put up with some somniferous defeats, I should not expect any different.

‘Vital spark missing in sad “picnic” display’ rang the headline to the great man’s weekly column.

The date was May 1968, Jersey had won 2-1 with a couple of ‘Noddy’ Ruellan goals and the red-and-whites had won number 10 in 11 games at Springfield when it was more often than not a dust-bowl and not the carpet that greeted our boys last weekend.

Remember, this was an era when St Martin’s swept all before them in CI football and we had widely-regarded great players.

But, they too, could have stinkers and seven days on from the Springfield somnolence of 2018 the old cutting provides mental comfort after spending days struggling to understand how we could be so bad, so ordinary, so uninventive and so well-beaten in a one-sided one-nil-er.

Chris Tardif was honest enough to admit that perhaps he and his assistants – all noted Muratti men themselves – were perhaps asking too much of the players to cope with different tactical and mental demands from the run-of-the-mill Guernsey FC schedule, but I don’t wholly buy that as an excuse.

It was more than that, moreover a combination of factors magnified by mistaken selection.

The player-boss is the third man to take on our Muratti side since the advent of the sporting vehicle which so many imagined would guarantee never-ending Muratti glory –the Green Lions.

Kevin Graham had no problem in adopting different ways to Tony Vance’s and the upshot was two good Muratti wins.

Steve Sharman, advantaged by being part of the GFC set-up, experienced the ups and downs of Muratti coaching life and also got a brilliant Island Games triumph on his CV, but had no obvious problems tweaking the group of players who everyone regards as our creme de la creme.

So why would Tardif be any different, especially as he had a pretty useful big match build-up with plenty of games to get his message over?

No, as is the case with most of the losses Guernsey have incurred down the years, it is more than just one element behind a loss and picking the right team is fundamental to that.

I’m sure if Tardif, who without question should get another two years because he is the best man outside GFC, could revisit the game he would have started Dom Heaume, he might have gone with three at the back and not gone with one solitary striker.

But it does not help when key players are so obviously not fully fit, which was the case with Craig Young.

And if the 2017 captain insists he was, then perhaps he’d admit to having a real stinker.

It was a poor effort all-round and a string of ‘6’ marks were, in hindsight, generous to a side who you would not have guessed have played so regularly together.

Annoyingly, this third loss in four will re-promote the question of ‘what has GFC done for the local game?’

Linking such a limp performance to GFC is an easy, misdirected route, but you can understand such a response when the performance is so miserable.

I never subscribed to the mantra that because of GFC we were signing up to a long, golden era of success.

It just so happened the Green Lions’ emergence coincided with that of one of the best generation of locally-raised footballers.

They, sadly, are fast reaching their sell-by dates and the replacements are, in general, not as good.

In all this, Jersey deserve much credit. They had a clear plan, clear structure, worked their socks off and know the carpet well.

Don’t be surprised if they win again next year, because the Guernsey management does not have a lot to play with.

n AS FOR the wholly separate issue of the match as spectacle, the Jersey-staged game has lost the plot.

They want people to come along and watch, yet here they are frisking every man or woman on entry into the stand for heaven’s sake.

This is the Channel Islands ...a simple game of football between the best of the two islands.

I cannot recall my wife ever contemplating carrying a handgun or miniature bomb in her handbag, or a knife perhaps tied inside her trousers, yet like myself the other half was subjected to a full-length frisking on entry to the ground where she had a stand ticket.

Needless to say, she won’t be returning to Springfield, and I don’t blame her.

I daresay if she had borrowed one of the old-time rattles or bells her father’s generation took with them to Murattis of the ’50s and ’60s, it would have been confiscated.

n INTERESTING to read some of the post-Commonwealth Games comments emanating from Jersey.

Like us, Jersey ended the Gold Coast trip with a clean 0-0-0 slot on the medal table, but the Caesareans’ tougher new approach to selection, which also focuses on youth, seems to have worked.

The Reds feel they had fewer duff performances than in the past.

Paul de Feu, the Caesareans’ Commonwealth Association president, was a hard taskmaster in the two-year build-up to Gold Coast and has not ruled out playing even tougher ahead of Birmingham 2022.

In an interview with the Jersey Evening Post, he concluded Team Jersey’s displays in Queensland raised the ‘bottom bar’ for minimum performances – but says the system used for qualification still needs tweaking.

‘For me as president the aim was to make sure our bottom bar was raised and to make sure we had fewer poor performances. We achieved that in bundles, but now, once we’ve said “well done”, we must move on.

‘Were we pleased? I think generally we are.’

‘We took athletes away to Australia who hadn’t competed enough, or hadn’t competed at the right level. They honestly thought they were good enough.

‘But we also had a lot of athletes performing right up there in the top echelons of their sport, compared to previous Games.’

And in a comment which is equally relevant to Guernsey’s own Commonwealth aspirations, he said: ‘The hard thing is how do we measure success and whether people think those performances are good enough. That’s the real killer.’