Russell Slade : The man under the cap

There is a cycle of emotions around every Orient game at the moment. It starts at the final whistle of each game when a tsunami of vilification pours forth. Before the players have even reached the dressing room they've been torn apart in the stands and on the internet. It lasts for a few days. Any comment on manager Russell Slade tends to finish with "...and he can take his cap with him". Any player who comes out on twitter and offers apologies is quickly back in favour (apart from a few who think they should do their talking on the pitch). CEO Matt Porter typically recieves a whole heap of abuse for not giving up on the team - until he responds to comments, when he is then praised for staying positive and holding things together. This tends to be the turning point of the week and slowly the players are being exhorted to give it their all because the fans are behind them and generally people want Slade to stick his cap on his head again and not anywhere else. There is the rare added bonus of an ex-player sticking his oar in and getting in a tete-a-tete (sans chapeau) with a current player about who cares the most about the club. I didn't see who the winner was but I guess it wasn't anyone who in twenty years time will still be paying to watch the team play, whatever division they are in. Sadly at the moment the cycle is completed when the Os concede three goals again and lose and it starts all over again.

Some of this is entirely understandable and justified. No one at the club is pretending that recent results even come close to being acceptable. Generally during games fans have resisted getting on the players backs but players and management have accepted that, in the aftermath of games at least, it is hard to remain positive in the face of repeated disappointment. People need to get it out of their system before they are ready to look forward to the next game.

What surprises me though is the vitriol that directed at players and management who were loved so recently for bringing us our best finish in nigh on 20 years. There isn't a single fan who isn't considering how they feel about Russell Slade right now. We are in a tailspin and everyone is fighting hard and trying everything to pull us round, when what we need are cool calm heads. At this stage of the season there is no time to step back and take a deep breath, big games are coming once or twice a week. I am not in that place yet but if I felt Slade needed to go to give us a chance to stay up it would be with a heavy heart and extreme reluctance.

For others it seems a lot easier and as the red mist descends all of the good things that Slade has done are obscured. Some people seem to out and out hate him and would kick him without a thought. Others seem to take a perverse pleasure in our forutnes (so long as it doesn't actually get as far as being relegated) because it gives them licence to vent their frustrations. It's often said that football fans enjoy complaining as much as they do celebrating. I stopped going to every away game after the promotion season because at the very end of that season people were still complaining as if we were at the other end of the table. I thought that if you couldn't enjoy the run in at the end of that season then what was the point? Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise. As I write this on a Saturday evening, I'm certain that if I turned on any terrestial TV station right now there will be a talent show on and another group of twnetysomethings (lets call them Christians) are being torn apart by internet Lions. Pardon me a Victor Meldrew moment, but it is what seems to pass for entertainment these days and as the Christians/Lions comment suggests, it is primative. People feel better about themselves when they are tearing someone apart more than they do from anything constructive or good.

If you want you can disregard how much pleasure and pride Slade gave us last season as we beat Arsenal 1-1 and put together an unbeaten run not many amongst the 4,000 faithful had seen in their lifetime. My impression of Russell Slade, who I've only met once after the Arsenal game, is one of a thoroughly decent intelligent man who speaks quietly but with authority. He has made tough decisions but doesn't appear to be the sort of person who would take any sort of pleasure from seeing a family man. In return he is faced with hundreds who would gladly see him put out of his job without a second thought for the longer term future of of him or the club. It is the default position of football fans to call for the managers head at the earliest opportunity and the callousness of it is deeply unpleasant.

When I was younger I was untroubled by such thoughts. Peter Eustace was our manager and we had gone from play off contenders to lower mid-table also rans. A set of barking mad programme notes about wagon trains from the Yorkshireman was followed by his postmatch quote following a defeat at Brighton, that if Eustace was in the trenches he wouldn't want his players standing behind him. I wanted Eustace to be shown the door and as far as I was concerned his cloth cap would come in handy for begging because he wasn't fit for a job in football. A few weeks later I came across Eustace during half time of another game we were on our way to losing. I was seething at another poor performance and here was the clown responsible. He looked up, smiled and said "wrap up lads, it's getting colder out there". Suddenly the cartoon Eustace evaporated and I saw a human being who despite having the troubles of the world on his shoulders had time for a kind and friendly word for a horrible teenager. When he finally left the club I felt relief (for him as much as us) but took no pleasure in his departure.

I felt the same with someone much more popular with me if not others, Tommy Taylor. I liked Tommy a lot, as a man and a manager (if not as a man manager!). It wasn't a feeling shared by many fans, who were ready to call for his head after a single defeat let alone the kind of run we are on at the moment. People who complain that managers these days say nothing in interviews used to lambast Tommy for his frank and forthright style rather than welcome the fact he'd talk openly with anyone. Despite liking him a lot as a person I did wonder if it was time for him to step down after the Millennium Stadium play off defeat and my reservations were realised when he was sacked in the middle of a slump the following season. Of course resigning from Leyton Orient isn't the same as being sacked by Manchester City and so of course he didn't resign from employment even if he did feel that his best chance to get us promoted had gone. I do know that Tommy was an Orient man and he'd have loved getting us promoted as much as any fan. I also know that in the last months of his reign it wasn't unusual to see him sitting on the stairs in the club, wracked with back pain - caused I am certain as much by stress as by an actual physical ailment. Unseen by the fans was a man as vulnerable as any other, regardless of his bravado. Throughout his time at the club he was forced to put a brave face on the fact he was so unpopular but I am sure it ate him up inside. Yet it didn't stop him coming back to enjoy the success of two of his former players finally getting us out of League Two. I can't imagine many managers coming back to the club in such circumstances and it said a lot for both him and Martin Ling for inviting him.

Russell Slade the football manager has put together one Orient squad that came close to reaching the play offs,  in a division filled with teams with greater financial resources than us. A victim of his own success he lost two of his best players. Without them Dean Cox has been expected to work miracles by himself. On top of that the young goalkeeper who was also linked with move stayed but then has been out injured all season. Some of the players he has brought in haven't worked out, others aren't anywhere near as bad as they have been made out to be. If we can scrape ourselves out of this mess then he has as much chance as anyone else of putting together another squad that can fight its way up the table. He has done it once before after all. It is a much bigger gamble to go out and get yet another manager. Successful people learn from their mistakes and I'd much rather see him do that here than anywhere else, whilst a new manager joins us and starts from square one. Changing our line up game by game has got us into this mess. In the long term changing managers frequently will have the same sort of effect.

If Slade does go it'll be off the back of a set of results that are difficult to argue with because only a spell of good form mid-season has stopped this being a catastrophic season. But whatever happens to Slade the manager, Slade the man has been treated shabbily. Football is more than a sport to many of us and yet we treat the human beings involved in it as if it was just one big game.