To Survive, or not to Survive - Holloway’s Blackpool Dilemma

By Oliver Sparrow, writing from London

Finally the fateful day has arrived - Survival Sunday. Come this evening we’ll all know who will be joining poor old Scott Parker’s West Ham in The Championship and who will be staying up to enjoy another season of fun and frolics in the Premier League. One man no-one will want to see go down, though, is Blackpool’s fantastically entertaining manager Ian Holloway.

He is a man who possesses a wonderful way with words and his post-match interviews will be sorely missed should Blackpool be relegated today. However, the fear of the drop will have been hanging over ‘Ollie’s head for the past few weeks now. As he wrestles with the prospect of life in The Championship, I wonder what thoughts might be running through Ian’s mind…

“To survive, or not to survive, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in Old Trafford to suffer
The whingers and philanderers of outrageous fortune,
Or to pit Ormerod ‘gainst a sea of reserves,
And by attacking beat them? To sit back, to defend.
No more; and by a defeat to say we end
The embarrassments, and the thousand defensive blunders
That Bloomfield is used to: ‘tis a relegation
Devoutly to be wished. To drop, to rest;
To rest, perchance to win – ay, there’s the rub:
For in that rest of The Championship what teams may come,
When we have plummeted from this Premier League,
Must give us parachute payments – but there’s the £90m
That rewards for one more year of life.
For who could bear another season of being the whipping boys,
Abramovich’s boons, Mansour’s schmucks,
The pangs of being outscored, the ref’s indecision,
The incompetence of the FA, and the greed
Of unscrupulous agents and mercenaries,
When Ollie ‘imself could end this all
By playing Kingson in goal and Harewood up top
In a defensive 4-5-1 formation?
Who could bear these Premiership trials,
To toil and sweat in the relegation zone,
If it weren’t for the dread of The Den and Elland Road,
Those dark, dingy hell-holes from whose bowels
No travelling Seasider returns, confuses the fan,
And makes us prefer getting slaughtered at Stamford Bridge
Than battling to a gritty bore-draw at the Stadium KC?
Thinking don’t ‘arf make your brain hurt,
What first seemed a pleasant descent through the leagues
Is confused with a wish to entertain the nation with more crazy interviews,
And a 4-5-1 of Kingson and Harewood,
May be replaced by a 3-4-3 with Campbell and Adam,
And slow our decline into obscurity. Soft you now,
Lineker et al! Pundits, in thy Match of the Day
Be all my brilliance remembered.”