Wed and buried

SO that's it then.
All over.
Our final match ended in a 2-1 defeat at Colchester.
And I'm left with the niggling knowledge that if we had managed to scrape just a few more points together over our last few games we would have been safe.
As expected Walsall and Dagenham both lost heavily in their final matches.
Walsall survived and Dagenham dropped with us.
Now I sit here wondering how I really feel about it all.
I don't think I feel sad or upset.
It's more like a completely numb sensation, like my whole body has been plunged into some kind of cryogenic state and won't thaw out until next season.
And breaking through is a hint of anger, too.
Anger that a team that should have been at least good enough to finish above the Tranmeres and Yeovils of this world - as well as a few others I could mention - has fallen away so badly.
Anger that a group of players on pretty good wages, with pretty decent reputations, were unable to perform to anything like their potential.
Anger that two managers failed to motivate them to display the required passion and commitment to maintain the status achieved for them by those who had gone before.
And anger that no doubt some of them will move on to claim bigger wage packets with other clubs, with barely a glance over their shoulders at the fans they have left behind.
Looking back, I wonder how it ever came to this . . .

IT was my second wedding anniversary this week.
When you celebrate such a milestone your thoughts inevitably drift back to the time you got married.
And sometimes you need signposts to jog your memory about that special time.
Well, I recall we had to switch the date, for starters.
We were all ready to go for the second bank holiday in May.
Then my brother texted me.
"What if Rovers got to the League One play-off final? That would be on the same Sunday," he pointed out.
After "consultation" with my wife, we moved it forward to the first bank holiday weekend of the month. She didn't want me having wistful thoughts of Ricky Lambert while she was walking down the aisle.
Even though I knew there was precious little chance of us competing for promotion I agreed, realising as I did that the decision had now jinxed our play-off chances.
Anyway, we settled on May 3.
The day before the nuptials I dragged my best man, a Crewe Alex supporter, along to the Mem to see the Mighty Gas in the last game of the season.
He wasn't disappointed.
We won 4-0.
Paul Trollope adopted an adventurous approach, playing three strikers in our goalscoring hero Lambert, Darryl Duffy and Jo Kuffour.
And we tore our north East visitors apart.
We even had a youngster on the wing I had barely heard of, who put in a performance to mesmerise the Hartlepool defence. A kid called Charlie Reece.
It was a day when I thought the future for those in the Blue and White Quarters looked refreshingly bright.
Flash forward exactly two years and here we are.
Going down to League 2 after a shambolic season.
Where did it all go wrong?
Quite simply, Lambert was the key to everything.
We had won matches, even in our promotion year, that were turned our way simply because of the happy knack he had of finding the target.
To lose Lambert after just one game the following season - admittedly for a decent fee - to Southampton was careless.
To then fail to replace him was downright calamitous.
Duffy and Kuffour were never going to gel into a prolific attack, they both needed a powerhouse down the middle to feed off. And the addition of loan players here and there was a gamble that only had a 50/50 chance at best.
Chris Dickson came in from Charlton and did well for a time, but he didn't have the all-round game, or determination, that Lambert possessed.
Trollope was also distracted by the fact we had managed to push ourselves into the top reaches of the league early in the season, failing to spot the obvious weaknesses that needed to be dealt with.
When things went wrong - a run of seven consecutive defeats - we carried on without a proven goalscorer, even though the board said there was money available to replace our talisman.
Then there was the ridiculous situation in the January transfer window when not only did we fail to bring a striker in, but we also let one of the only ones we had - Duffy - go out on loan to Carlisle.
The emergency loan signing of Paul Heffernan from Doncaster papered over the cracks, and persuaded supporters that we were a comfortable mid-table club when, without his presence, we would have been fighting a relegation battle a year earlier.
When Heffernan went we lapsed back to our old ways and struggled to see the season out, putting together another string of poor results.
But despite the obvious warnings we didn't strengthen an area where we blatantly needed more power - up front.
Yes, we signed Will Hoskins - a brilliant addition - but I just wonder what he would have done with a bustling, traditional centre forward beside him.
Instead, Duffy went on loan to Hibernian for a year and once again we were left with two strikers on the books.
Meanwhile, we had so many central midfielders that many of them couldn't get a game in Trollope's rigid 4-4-2 system. When they did, players like Wayne Brown and Dominic Blizzard well played out of position.
Without the guiding hand of the experienced Lennie Lawrence, who had left the club, Trolls undoubtedly struggled and it didn't seem he had anyone to turn to when things went wrong.
There were some dire results - including an appalling 6-1 defeat at the hands of League 2 Oxford - and though results improved from there, Gasheads never had the feeling that we were going to dominate teams in the way we had managed on occasion two years earlier.
Even his new assistant Darren Patterson, promoted from looking after the youth team, didn't appear to have much influence on the manager.
When Trollope was sacked Patterson suggested we hadn't been playing the right way, and that there were glaring gaps in the squad. Strange for a right-hand man to criticise the man who actually gave him his promotion, I thought.
This was in December, when the problems should really have been identified before the season started. One wondered why Patterson hadn't spoken up before, preferably to Trolls himself.
As the catalogue of mistakes continued the board dragged their feet over appointing Trollope's replacement.
They had the ideal opportunity to act quickly. Bad weather meant a number of games were called off so though the Gas had slipped into the bottom four the new boss would have more time to lift us out of it - PLUS he would have the January transfer window.
But time dragged on and when Dave Penney finally arrived he had missed a good opportunity to get to know the players while they were sat around kicking their heels at snow-covered training grounds.
His initial thoughts were that he could get us out of the mess.
He hadn't counted on Rovers Jekyll and Hyde nature.
A promising 2-2 draw at home to Walsall seemed to show the team was capable of a decent level of football, but it was followed by a 4-0 defeat at Carlisle.
Penney was convinced the main job for himself and new assistant manager Martin Foyle was to shore up the defence.
The introduction of Dave McCracken, on loan from Brentford, seemed to have done the trick as they kept a clean sheet in a 0-0 home draw against Hartlepool.
It was followed by a 3-1 win at home to local rivals Swindon and it looked like the new boss had turned the corner.
But then came another of those days when the OTHER Rovers turned up. Worse still, it was the return game against relegation rivals Walsall.
They were hammered 6-1, a pitiful display in front of a good following.
And this wasn't about bad defending, it was about a failure to compete across the board.
Penney needed new characters, and quick. But he was running out of time.
He attempted to tackle the problem by bringing in non-contract players like Gavin Williams from Bristol City and Danny Senda from Torquay.
And, having run out of patience with young goalkeeper Scott Daniels, on loan from West Brom, he bought in Conrad Logan from Leicester.
To Penney's credit, most of them were good additions.
But still the problem was there. Who would score the goals?
Even the output of the reliable Hoskins had now dried up while Kuffour was so ineffective he was replaced by the bustling, hard working Rene Howe, on loan from Peterborough.
But whatever Penney tried, he couldn't seem to get a run going.
What's more a large number of fans, having been "warned" that his style of football wasn't the most eyecatching by supporters of his previous club Oldham, began to turn on him over his tactics.
In the end he signed his own death warrant. Well, spoke it anyway.
After a 2-0 home defeat by relegation rivals Dagenham he told the press Rovers looked like they were going down.
A few days later - in a move that shocked many - he was dismissed and replaced by stalwart midfielder Stuart Campbell.
It was a last throw of the dice by the board. A gamble. They had no idea whether it would work.
But they needed to galvanise Rovers support in a last desperate attempt to get the fans through the turnstyles.
And at first it paid off. Three successive away wins, a new spirit, a home draw against promotion-chasing Peterborough and things looked bright.
But once the initial bounce wore off it became clear that the strength of the squad to maintain a higher standard as the games came thick and fast was just not there.
Nor was the quality.
And when Rovers failed to beat Sheffield Wednesday they were down.
Who to blame? You can't pick out any single person in this sorry tale.
If a lesson is to be learned it must be in the planning.
The board were naive. They believed that the playing side of things was sorted. The team was in the capable hands of Paul Trollope and the priority was now a new stadium.
They couldn't react quickly enough, or see the danger signs early enough.
And I also believe they lost their bottle in the end, dismissing a manager after 13 games when I still think he needed to be able to execute a long-term plan.
Paul Trollope was inexperienced, particularly in the transfer market.
He started to build what he hoped would be a Championship side by signing players he believed to be decent footballers on good deals. He looked at their ability, but I wonder how much he looked into their character.
Too many of them went missing when the going got tough.
He also made two cardinal errors.
He FAILED to plan ahead for a time when Lambert would leave the club.
And he went into a particularly long, hard season with a squad that didn't have enough cover in vital positions.
A friend to many players, his departure also left the new manager with an unenviable task.
Dave Penney failed to revitalise the team and build their confidence.
Perhaps he pointed out their weaknesses in public too much.
These players weren't used to being criticised under the previous boss.
And he made the cardinal error of writing off Rovers chances of escape too soon.
Stuart Campbell, of course, did nothing wrong and a hell of a lot right.
But the players? They lacked character in adversity, leaders on the pitch and quality in vital positions. I also believe that for too long they believed the myth they were too good to go down.
Their failure to play for Penney - whatever they thought of his manner or his tactics - was simply unforgivable.
One thing is for sure. You cannot go into League 2 with players unprepared to compete for every ball, put their body in where it hurts and hunker down for a scrap.
You also need players - like the Lamberts of this world - who know where the net is and hit it regularly.
I don't know where we will be this time next year.
Important decisions must be made.
But I'll keep supporting the Gas, knowing that however often we get knocked down it is worth it, if only for those times when we surprise even ourselves by punching above our weight.
And if there is one thing we Gasheads have it is resilience and loyalty.
So to all those fans from across the other side of the City who think that our new lowly status will send us in droves to Ashton Gate to watch Championship football - think again.
Because it may not be this year, or next year, or even a few years from now ... but some day down the line I'm sure the Gas will rise again.

The Gas goes out

So that's it.
Finally, after 50 games spanning nine months, the Gas has finally gone out.
My beloved Bristol Rovers are down.
Relegated.
We couldn't even take it to the last game of the season.
After some pretty incredible highs, and far more bottomless lows, I now sit here wondering what to make of it all.
I remember a couple of weeks before season 2010/11 started that I was nervously excited, wondering if this might be the year the Gas forced their way to promotion and a place in the championship.
But having seen our moves in the summer there was a nagging doubt about the squad we had put together.
We had released experienced players, signed a few decent ones, but there was a large question mark over whether the squad was big enough, strong enough, experienced enough to compete with the other teams in what had become an increasingly competitive division.
The answer - after all I have seen this season - was a resounding 'no'.
Our last rites were delivered by fallen giants Sheffield Wednesday in front of more than 8,000 fans at the Mem on Saturday.
We had approached a lot of matches over the previous few months saying they were "must win games".
But this was definitely a must win game.
Lose and we were certainly down.
Draw and we might, just might, still have a chance of salvaging something in our last game at Colchester, provided our relegation rivals Walsall and Dagenham didn't win.
But at around 4.55 on Saturday, having sat looking at my computer screen with every finger crossed, willing my team to win with the hope that the powers of positive thought might bring us a last-gasp winner, the score came up on the screen.
Bristol Rovers 1, Sheffield Wednesday 1.
With Carlisle putting up barely a whimper and going down 3-0 at Dagenham, and Walsall having overcome a pretty disinterested Charlton 2-0, I knew we would be playing League 2 football next season.
We weren't MATHEMATICALLY down, but our abysmal goal difference meant we would have to go to Colchester and win something ridiculous like 17-0 to preserve out League 1 status.
And what a horrible feeling it was.
It possibly didn't affect me as badly as some of my fellow Gasheads, though. The ones who had kept the faith through the dying embers of our season, turning up to shout our players on to the very last kick, still believing that we had the ability and the nous to get us out of our sorry predicament.
They were wrong.
Back a few weeks ago I had a glimmer of hope. I thought we might have the momentum to fight our way clear of trouble.
The 1-0 home win against Bournemouth that took us out of the bottom four for the first time since November led me to believe that the Gas might put in a lung-bursting sprint to get over the finish line.
But my hope evaporated when the following weekend we put up a wretched, rudderless performance in losing 2-0 at home to our west country neighbours Exeter City.
After that, even though I listened with hope rather than expectation as we led at Bournemouth for 80 minutes on Easter Monday, I knew in my heart of hearts that the writing was on the wall.
We just weren't good enough.
Weren't strong enough.
And didn't have the tactical knowhow or the experience needed to climb clear of trouble.
Horror defeats have littered our season.
A 6-1 Carling Cup defeat to Oxford, a team a league lower than us, and a 2-1 reverse at Darlington in the FA Cup.
In the league there was a 4-0 defeat at home to Southampton and a 6-2 loss at Sheffield Wednesday and, possibly worst of all, a 6-0 thumping by Walsall, one of our rivals in the battle to escape the drop.
Those results showed me that what this team really lacked was bottle.
When the going got tough, they couldn't get going.
We used four different managers in all, but none of them could sustain a run of form to get us clear of danger.
The board's last throw of the dice, kicking out Dave Penney just 14 games after he began his reign, was to put our midfield stalwart Stuart Campbell in charge.
Call me an old cynic, but I reckon this was purely to ensure the crowd managed to reach the club's break even figure for the remaining home games.
Penney had told the press we were as good as down. The board couldn't have that and knew they needed a figure to galvanise the fan base.
Admittedly it worked for a few games. We won three vital matches away from home even though, at Yeovil, we somehow stole a match we should have lost by another cricket score.
The players all wanted to play for Stu, the man that behind the scenes they affectionately called Grandad.
But the simple truth was that the effort they put in was nothing compared to the quality of football they needed to produce to pull off the great escape.
I need to sit in a dark room for a few days and digest this. Decide the way forward. Hope that we can learn from our mistakes.
I'll wait for the Colchester game to come and go, then I'll put into words my own thoughts on where we went wrong, and how we ended up in a situation which no Gashead really expected when the first ball was kicked back in August.
I'm sure the pain will pass, eventually.