The season – and arguably life itself – can be divided into two distinct periods. BC (Common Era) and AD.

I’m not entirely sure what the first very Politically Correct acronym actually means but I do know that the other one – AD – very definitely stands for After Derek.

It is a matter of record that Derek Adams left Morecambe Football Club as soon as the job he said he was here to do – promotion to League One – was achieved. That happened less than a year ago at Wembley.

So the first big watershed of this season After Derek was the appointment of a new manager at the Mazuma Stadium. The Morecambe Board chose Stephen Robinson.

It seemed a sound choice at the time. Robbo had a tremendous reputation as a result of his work at Motherwell in the Scottish Premiership. He seemed to establish some sort of reputation for integrity too, by his decision to leave the club once he decided he could take it no further. This sort of principled behaviour is rare in football.

To be fair to him – with less than a handful of players signed-up for the new challenge and lynchpins of the old Derek Adams team (notably Carlos Mendes-Gomes and Yann Songo’o) departed for Pastures New, Stephen had little time to build a squad and not as many resources as lots of even League Two and National League clubs can call upon to do so.

Initially, though, he seemed to have pulled it off. Against all the odds, Bookies’ Favourites for Relegation Morecambe drew at Favourites for Promotion Ipswich’s Portman Road 2-2 in the opening game of the season, having led twice. This match – to mark the difference between the exalted plain which the Shrimps had reached for the first time and everything they had experienced before – was played in front of the biggest crowd that had ever watched a football match they had been involved in at a club ground: 21,309 people. It also marked another regular event as far as Morecambe would be concerned – Cole The Goal Stockton scoring. (Both goals on this occasion…)

It got better. In their very next game, Morecambe travelled east across Lancashire to meet Blackburn Rovers in a competitive football fixture for the first time ever. And deservedly knocked the Championship side out of the League Cup by coming from behind to win 1-2.  

But the excellent results and good performance didn’t last long. There had been rumours right from the start of the season that charismatic Club Captain Sam Lavelle was about to leave. He duly did – on August 31^st last year. His move to rivals Charlton Athletic left a massive gulf which arguably has not been filled even yet. The team started to lose and look repeatedly All At Sea in defence where new Captain Anthony O’Connor clearly struggled to lead by example in the way that Sam had done.

I wrote – as long ago as 18^th December last:

“Morecambe have struggled in League One. Manager Stephen Robinson potentially made a Rod for his own back (no offence, Mr Chairman) by stating last week: `We need to get six points from the next three games to be exactly where I thought we would be.’ Given that his team immediately went on to lose at Portsmouth, he has created a situation where Shrimps must not only beat Fleetwood today but also win against Bolton next time out in order to keep on track.”

They didn’t. I wrote last November, some time after the departure of Sam Lavelle:

“It’s a concern that Aaron Wildig seems to have returned to a pattern all too familiar to Shrimps’ supporters from when Jim Bentley was in charge of the club. He seemed to be perennially injured or unwell then and rarely played a full ninety minutes. Last season, though, he equally rarely missed a game and usually played the full hour and a half into the bargain. Derek Adams seemed to be able to inspire what has always been one of the club’s better talents to display that skill week-in, week-out. So what’s happened? Robbo also persists with Burnley loanee Adam Phillips, whose languid performances for far too long (not tracking-back; constantly overhitting the ball and numerous other crimes against the Beautiful Game) have not been good enough to earn him a place in a Northern Premier League side.”

Since King Derek returned to the club, Wildig has played virtually every fixture for the full ninety minutes – and recently as Captain.  Aaron – in my view – has been among the Top Three of the obviously Most Talented footballers at the club in recent times. (I include in this exalted company Cole the Goal Stockton; the sadly departed Carlos Mendes-Gomes and my own Player of the [last two] Seasons, Toumani Diagouraga.)  Other players – notably Liam Gibson, Arthur Gnahoua and Rhys Bennett – looked like different people under Derek Adams’ tutelage. And the surprise package of Derek’s renewed reign is undoubtedly Dylan Connolly. From running around like a headless chicken when Robbo was still in charge, the Irishman suddenly looks like a real asset to the team with his phenomenal speed, brilliant ball control and his increasing determination not to be knocked out of his stride. Shades of Carlos once again – from being a bit part player at best before Derek arrived at the club, Dylan now is one of the club’s brightest prospects.

In my view, the biggest mistake Stephen Robinson made was to announce to the world at large that he had worked out an Equation for League One survival. He said that looking at the League One campaign as a whole was a quite mind-boggling prospect. Fair enough. It made more sense, he insisted, to break the season down into bite-sized chunks of five games at a time. The simple equation he then suggested was that if any team could win two of these five games; any extra points would be a bonus. But just two wins and three defeats out of every bunch of five matches would – he insisted – guarantee League One survival. (Socks off, a quick calculation: 46 games divided by 5 is 9. Nine times single packages of six points gives us 54 points in total. This would have placed Morecambe in fifteenth position in the table at the end of the campaign; they actually ended-up in nineteenth with only 42 points.) So Robbo’s calculation allowed a large bit of Wriggle Room because it actually erred on the cautious side. But it made a sort-of sense. However, what made no sense at all was to tell everybody about this. His team – and thus his own performance – could be measured by it. And – once he announced this target – the team consistently failed to meet it.

By the time he left – February this year – his team had only won two of their last ten league games; lost four and drawn four of them. Bear with me. This equates to five points for every five games played: he’d said they needed at least six. So here was a stick measuring success and failure which he created himself which other people could use to beat him with. It was a mistake on every level (not least that five points per five games breaks down to a point per game which would have given Morecambe 46 points for the whole season – four more than they actually achieved.) Stephen didn’t help himself either by employing the Broken Record Technique “We are conceding too many poor goals – this must stop” from roughly the time Captain Sam left until the day he turned his back on the club. It didn’t stop and Morecambe ended-up shipping more goals (88) than any other club in the division.

Many supporters have dubbed Robbo as `Judas’ for abandoning a ship which was definitely sinking when he did. Given the commitments he had made publicly to be here for the long haul, there is some validity to this view. But few people would turn down a much longer contract on far better terms such as the one Mr Robinson was offered to jump ship and defect to St Mirren.  With the benefit of hindsight, though, his decision to leave has turned out to be the absolutely pivotal event of this season. St Mirren must regret it – they have lost eight of the ten games he had been in charge subsequently and are in danger of being relegated from the Scottish Premiership altogether. But Morecambe definitely don’t regret his departure….

The week before Robbo decided to go, Derek Adams had been sacked by new employers Bradford City. He said, when he left, that the Bantams would not find a better Manager than him wherever they looked. He’s right – few if any of his rivals in the UK have a better record of achieving multiple promotions as he did for Ross County in Scotland; nor for taking clubs upwards from League Two in this country, as he has done for both us and Plymouth in the recent past.

And so it has proved. Initially, Morecambe continued to struggle on the field – and perhaps play even worse than previously – with hammerings at both Shrewsbury (five-nil) and Wigan (four-one) where they were simply outclassed on the day by the eventual Title Winners.

But the International Break intervened and this proved to be the Turning Point of the season. Derek was able to properly coach the players left to him by the departed Manager and when League One started again, the set-up of the team and the obvious discipline he had instilled in the defence changed the club’s fortunes entirely. Immediately after the Wigan debacle, Morecambe won three games and drew one in their next magical block of five matches: promotion form. At the beginning of April, Derek announced that three wins would suffice to keep the club in the division. His players duly achieved this aim. Perhaps this is one of the key differences between Derek Adams and his predecessor – he only announces what he actually thinks is possible to the outside world. In typical self-deprecatory style, once the deed was done, King Derek announced last Saturday:

“I came here before and we were going out of the Football League and I think it was more difficult this time because I had less games to do it in, we only had thirteen matches.”

It was a master of understatement: the transformation Mr Adams has overseen at Morecambe Football Club could be better – and more accurately – described as miraculous. The fact that he has personally saved the club twice now from a very uncertain future means that this man is worth at least his own weight in gold.

Now, of course, his task is to do the same thing again – or even improve on this season’s tremendous achievement next term. One good thing is that events at the Maz next time out will no longer be covered by terrestrial TV programme EFL On Quest.

Perhaps the lowest point of the season was reached when – following riotous behaviour by a minority of Bolton Wanderers’ supporters at and around the ground in February – presenter Colin `I’ve made a Mint, suckers’ Murray and his inarticulate, barely literate guest Clinton `I shop at Waitrose, not’ Morrison combined to present a slander of the club to the watching millions. They deliberately totally ignored the evidence of missile-throwing and a pitch invasion by the visiting hordes and instead combined to echo visiting Manager Ian Evatt’s totally unsubstantiated accusations of racist behaviour by the home crowd. In doing so, they labelled Morecambe a Neanderthal, reactionary and wholly prejudiced outfit. This label has stuck even though there was (and still is) not a jot of evidence to support what the boss of serial cheats Wanderers claimed at the time.

So I suspect I was not alone in reaching for the sick bag when the same muppets who accused our club of unacceptable behaviour whilst ignoring the appalling violence of the visiting fans were eulogising about the Shrimps in their penultimate show last Saturday night. I think that an apology would have been more appropriate – but hell will freeze over before hypocrites of this sort ever would do anything like that. But we sail on forward together – as EFL on Quest and its crew effectively founder and then sink without trace altogether. Good riddance to them – and (nearly) all who sailed with them as well…

Derek Adams didn’t mess about this week by announcing the Club’s Retained List on Monday.

The continuing faith he has in Captain Aaron Wildig was indicated by a new contract for the player. Impressive understudy to first-choice custodian Trevor Carson – Adam Smith – has also been retained as has the Academy goalkeeper, André Da Silva Mendes. Much-improved striker Arthur Gnahoua has also accepted a new contract, which is excellent news too. Dylan Connolly; Liam Gibson, Ousmane Fané and Cole Stockton still have a year to run on their contacts. Whether in-demand Cole in particular stays is very much in the lap of the gods – time alone will tell.

However, the new Manager clearly has reservations about the rest of the players he has inherited from Stephen Robinson. Jonah Ayunga, Ryan Cooney, Ryan Delaney, Courtney Duffus, Wes McDonald, Ryan McLaughlin, Shane McLoughlin, Jon Obika, Anthony O’Connor, and Connor Pye are all on the transfer list.

Some of these won’t be missed if they leave. I think we all know who they are.

Jonah Ayunga looked like a first-class acquisition when he first played for the club. He was injured early doors and has not shown the same promise since. Similarly, Jon Obika has been injured for most of the time he has been at Morecambe. Perhaps they are both worth a second chance, though. I would also say the same about Anthony O’Connor. I thought he improved markedly as a player as the season progressed and his commitment to the cause – particularly after the win at Fleetwood – cannot be doubted. In my view, Shane McLaughlin also performed well when he was played in midfield earlier in the season. But we all have our own views on who should stay and who should go – ultimately, it is the man who sits in the Boss’ chair who decides. And he has allowed Rhys Bennett, Toumani Diagouraga, Greg Leigh, Jacob Mensah and Freddie Price to leave the club. I’m personally surprised to see Bennett being released and `Toums’ has been a loyal – and popular – servant to both Mr Adams over the years at various clubs as well as for the entire time he has been at our club. He and Greg Leigh at least – with no offence intended to Jacob and Freddie, about whom I know very little – will be missed.

Inevitably, the loan players in the squad – Jacob Bedeau, Trevor Carson, Alfie McCalmont and Adam Phillips have now all returned to their parent clubs. I would personally like to see Morecambe move heaven and earth to persuade both Trevor and Jacob to come back next season – or even be signed permanently if such a thing is possible. They are both class acts and Carson has kept the Shrimps in the hunt virtually on his own at times in the short time he has been at the club. For me, both Alfie and Adam in particular were far too inconsistent throughout the season to be borrowed again.

But what will happen during the Closed Season is obviously in the lap of the gods. Behind the scenes, there will be reasons affecting King Derek’s decisions – injuries; age; distance from families; whatever – that we are not party to. We do know, though, that the Boss likes to choose and then negotiate with his targets for next season personally. He did brilliantly last time he was in charge.

Let’s hope he does so again. It will be interesting to see what happens over the summer.

In the meantime, we can all look forward to another Adventure in League One-derland next season.

My personal reflections on all the games Morecambe have played this season can be found at:

Shrimplythebestfootball.com

See you all when the fun begins again. Stay Safe everyone.