Pep’s not coming

Pete Wild, meanwhile, slipped away with all the ceremony of a lodger leaving a semi in Rock Ferry. No grand farewell, no swelling music, no emotional montage set to something by Elbow. Just a quiet exit and, one imagines, a polite closing of the door. Which is probably fair enough. He was never meant to be the long-term answer, merely the man holding the fort while the fort itself developed fresh cracks.

 

The players have gone in much the same fashion. A few notices pinned to the wall, a handful of names drifting out of the building, and that was that. Cam, Sol, Omari and company have moved on, the loanees have evaporated back to their parent clubs, and there is no obvious sign of anyone arriving to replace them. One or two might have been worth keeping around for another look, but that does rather depend on somebody being empowered to make a football decision, and at present that appears to be a luxury item.

 

So here we are: adrift, bobbing somewhere off Hilbre and hoping the tide eventually remembers we exist. Pre-season is looming, the players are on holiday, and the usual business of a football club ought by now to involve plans, contracts, training schedules and at least one rumour involving a versatile full-back from League One. Instead, there is fog. Who takes the sessions? Who signs the players? More to the point, which player with options elsewhere looks at all this and thinks, yes, that seems a stable and sensible environment in which to spend the next two years?

 

Supporters, naturally, are clinging to the phrase ‘imminent takeover’ as though it were a life raft. The trouble is that imminent, in ordinary language, suggests something likely to happen fairly soon. In Tranmere language, it appears to mean some point between next week and the heat death of the universe. It has the flavour of the friend who announces every Monday that this is definitely the week they start eating clean, only to be discovered by Thursday elbow-deep in garlic bread and promising that the real reset begins after the weekend.

 

Perhaps, of course, this is all the fault of the EFL, rudely insisting on asking prospective owners awkward little questions such as whether they are fit and proper, whether they possess actual money, and whether their grand plans extend beyond the ceremonial holding of a scarf. One can see how such bureaucracy might jar. There have even been whispers that the latest arrangement has, shall we say, lost a wheel. If so, we are once again left peering through the window at a transaction that may or may not exist, like diners outside a restaurant arguing over who has already paid for the bread.

 

Oddly enough, we have heard very little about season-ticket sales, though many of us have once again shoved our hands into our pockets and signed up for another year of this peculiar arrangement. Supporting a football club is not entirely unlike a low-level hostage situation in which the captives keep renewing the contract. We tell ourselves the pain is character-building, the chaos is temporary, and the people in charge surely mean well. It is either devotion or Stockholm Syndrome, and at this point the distinction feels academic.

 

And yes, it could be worse. In theory it can always be worse. We could be staring down non-League, or unveiling a manager whose chief qualification is having once shouted at a fourth official on television. But that is hardly a comfort. The real problem is not catastrophe, it is drift: the sense that everyone is waiting for somebody else to arrive and begin the grown-up part of the process. Until then, uncertainty remains the club’s most consistent feature, which is an odd thing to build a season on, though not, sadly, an unfamiliar one.