In my professional career, more years ago than I’d care to remember, my employer adopted a new methodology called “Lean Six Sigma”. Any change management professionals reading this will be forgiven for wanting to stop reading but hear me out!
The underlying principle is that if you waste less and make fewer mistakes during production, then your margins improve, product quality improves and everyone, from customer, to employee, to shareholder is suitably delighted. I wonder if John Eustace is a devotee of Lean Six Sigma?
Amongst my favourite Rovers-supporting seasons are the two years under the auspices of Howard Kendall. He took over a club that was down on its uppers having been relegated to the third tier for the second time in the 1970’s and he won promotion back to the Second Division at the first attempt and was a whisker away from delivering promotion to the First Division the very next season.
The promotion season of 1979/80 had Rovers finishing second, scoring 58 goals in a 46-game season – a little over 1.2 per game. The success came from a robust defence that conceded just 36, comfortably the division’s best.
Kendall clearly thought there was room for more efficiency and less waste and the following year he steered Rovers to fourth in the Second Division, amazingly scoring just 42 goals in 42 games. The defence? Well four fewer games clearly, but they conceded just 29. The divisional champions in 1981 were West Ham who matched Rovers defence, but the difference-maker was that they scored 79 goals.
The point here is that Kendall cut his cloth accordingly, based on the resources he had at his disposal and established a team that were ruthlessly efficient. A single goal was often enough to take (the then) two points. Scoring a second was wasteful. Eliminate the errors, be ruthlessly efficient and let’s see where that takes us seemed to be his approach. Thirteen (count ’em) 1-0 victories in 1979/80, no waste there, no room for defensive errors.
This season we have already seen a dreadful run of seven games from the beginning of October yield just four points from 21 (with only two goals scored), turn into late-November form of three consecutive victories, two of them by that single-goal margin, 1-0.
It’s hardly rocket science to point out that if you don’t concede a goal then the worst you get is a point, but if there is one thing that John Eustace seems to have been concentrating on, it is defensive solidity. Eliminate the errors, eliminate the waste, see where that takes you...
Rovers were somewhat fortunate to take all three points at Middlesbrough as Dom Hyam’s winning goal was clearly offside but you won’t need me to remind you of a dreadful offside decision given against Rovers at Turf Moor, so perhaps these things do even out in the long run? That said, I’m fairly certain that all Rovers supporters would willingly have swapped the three from Boro for the point from t’Turf!
What does all of this mean? Well it’s clearly a far cry from the JDT “you score three...we’ll score four...” approach. Nothing wrong with open, entertaining football I guess, so long as it isn’t your opponents playing all the open, entertaining football. Too often, Rovers were far too easy to get at and ultimately, enthusiasm for the project seemed to wane in the squad.
How can Rovers capitalise on this great start? Well, a look at the all-competitions goal-scoring charts for this season are illuminating. Sam Szmodics is in third with three...disappointingly his tally seems to have dropped off since the end of August...
Yuki Ohashi has five, but none since September 14th. Sandwiched between those two is Andy Weimann who is quickly carving himself out a niche for scoring great goals, if he is perhaps not a great goal-scorer.
Spreading the goals around certainly reduces the risk of being overly dependent on a single player – see Rhodes, Armstrong, Brereton-Diaz, Szmodics – so there is that; but the weak point of this team is clear to see.
If Rovers can somehow conjure up a loan signing or two in January to broaden and deepen this squad, there’s no reason to suggest that a play-off push cannot be sustained. The “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there but it’s definitely something that many Rovers fans ponder as we sit just two points outside the play-off places with a game in hand.
Rovers’ top scorer in 1981 was Kevin Stonehouse (sadly no longer with us) with just ten league goals. Next was a kid Kendall once tried to sell, one Simon Garner, with seven.
Rovers, currently, are scoring at a little over 1.2 per game – so not quite as ruthlessly efficient as that Kendall team of 1980-81, but can they conceivably match fourth place? That’s the key question.
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