Cheltenham Town are getting left at the races
They're starting to make international headlines for their failure to score a goal, but Cheltenham Town are not a "crisis club".
The nationals are starting to pay attention, and not only in this country. In L’Equipe’s first weekly round-up of “improbable statistics from the start of the season”, there they were. The Guardian ran a piece this morning. The Athletic probably already have someone tapping away at a laptop on ‘the inside story’ of it all as I type these very words. Cheltenham Town are going viral, and not in the way that they would have wanted.
Cheltenham have become The Team Who Cannot Score, although that’s not completely, strictly true. They scored at least once in each of their pre-season friendlies, which included matches against West Bromwich Albion, Birmingham City and Bristol City.
And they did score once in their 4-1 defeat at Bristol Rovers in the Premier League Under-21s Energy Drinks Shield, though this is complicated somewhat by the fact that this goal was an own goal, scored by Bristol Rovers’ James Gibbons, who now has the somewhat dubious honour of being Cheltenham’s top goalscorer for the season, even though we’re now into October. And on top of all that, three of the goals they’ve conceded have been own goals, so it’s arguable that he’s only the joint-top scorer with those three.
While they may have become The Team Who Cannot Score, Cheltenham’s results haven’t been entirely disastrous. They’re bottom of League One but they do have one point on the board, claimed from a trip to the division’s leaders Portsmouth with a goalless draw. Considering how tight the top of League One was at the end of last season, you start to wonder about the extent to which Pompey may regret firing blanks at the division’s bottom team for ninety minutes come April or May.
But that’s enough silver linings. Cheltenham Town supporters have probably got a little bored of looking for them, this last couple of months or so. But there is one more. This evening, this very evening, comes another chance to break that duck with a home match against second-from-bottom Fleetwood Town. Considering that Fleetwood’s head honcho was sent to prison for fraud earlier this year and that they’ve been widely expected to struggle this season. If this is such a problem, it’s possible to construct an argument that they won’t get a better chance to break that duck—in the League, at least—all season.
The Football League record for the least goals scored in one season is currently held by Loughborough Town during the 1899/00 season. They managed 18 goals in 34 matches that season in Division Two, finishing bottom of the table with eight points and just one win, losing 12-0 to Woolwich Arsenal in a match in which their opponents had to pay their travel expenses because they couldn’t afford to pay for their own. It was only their second season in the League, and perhaps unsurprisingly it also turned out to be their last.
They failed to be re-elected at the end of the season and along with Luton Town, who’d also joined two years earlier but were opting to return to the Southern League, were replaced with Blackpool and Stockport County. Loughborough applied for and were accepted back into the Midland League, but failed to turn up for the fixtures meeting on the 9th June. Three weeks later a meeting was held at which it was decided that, on the basis of a complete lack of contact from anyone connected with it, the club was defunct. That 12-0 defeat to Woolwich Arsenal remains Arsenal’s record league win to this day.
Cheltenham Town in 2023/24 are surely not that bad. And in a world in which off-the-field shenanigans can have a ruinous effect on a team’s wellbeing, it should be pointed out that this in no way looks anything like the sort of crises affecting, say, Reading, Southend United and Scunthorpe United. The last available set of company accounts, for the 2021/22 season, shows a £400,000 profit and cash in hand at the bank. Cheltenham finished last season in 16th place in the table. If anything, their issues came at the other end of the pitch, where they conceded four goals in the league on five separate occasions and were knocked out of the League Cup after losing 7-0 at home to Exeter City.
If there is a single reason for their bluntness in front of goal this season, the loss of last season’s top scorer Alfie May to Charlton Athletic during the summer is the obvious place to start. May scored 20 goals for them in the league last season, out of the 45 that they managed in 46 matches. May has scored four in eight in the league so far this season for Charlton. They paid £250,000 for his services and it seems reasonable to assume that he is very much missed at Whaddon Road.
So, what are they to do? Their manager at the start of the season, Wade Elliott, has completely unsurprisingly already paid for this season’s slow start with his job after their 3-0 defeat at Peterborough United last month. His replacement is Darrell Clarke, who took Port Vale into League One in 2022 and was then sacked in April 2023 with the team perilously close to the relegation places. The Port Vale team that Clarke built ended last season in 18th place in the table. He looks like a decent appointment, given the circumstances, and the Fleetwood match is his managerial debut at Whaddon Road.
This isn’t a ‘crisis’, in the sense that we have come to talk about crises at football clubs in recent years. This downturn is a football issue, not a badly-run business issue. A win against Fleetwood would not be enough to lift Cheltenham off the bottom of the table. They’re already four points adrift, but they need a win, and they really need a goal, scored by one of their own players, and at the right end of the pitch. It is obviously vanishingly unlikely that they could even go until the end of this month without scoring but at the moment their supporters can’t even say that for certain. The new Cheltenham Town manager has got his work cut out.