I'm really made up for how well Blackpool are doing. My dad is now over 70 years old and he's been a fed up supporter of them for many years. I really hope they beat Bristol City this weekend to claim a play off place. Anyway IMO this is a brilliant article and has a great outlook on things which could easily be applied to ourselves. Whatever happens from now on to the end, this season has been a blast.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... g-One.html
Ian Holloway: I go past Blackpool's rollercoaster every single day but, believe me, our next match against Bristol City really is... The Big One!EXCLUSIVE By Chris Wheeler
Last updated at 10:34 PM on 29th April 2010
Every day when Ian Holloway drives to work he can see the main rollercoaster attraction at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It's called The Big One.
The name and nature of the ride are not lost on a man whose colourful metaphors are something of a trademark. Quite simply, it doesn't get any bigger for Blackpool Football Club than the chance to play in the Barclays Premier League.
Victory over Bristol City - Holloway's hometown team he loves to hate - on Sunday will guarantee a place in the play-offs and a shot at what most people would have considered to be the unthinkable.
It is safe to say that Holloway, who inherited a team more familiar with the bottom half of the Championship table less than a year ago, was not one of them.
'You don't get on a ride and think "I'm going to have to get off",' he says.
'You get on and you should enjoy it all the way no matter what.
'Every day I drive in I see that great big ride which I haven't been brave enough to go on yet, possibly because the first time I drove past it had broken down.
'But if you ask Burnley about the ride they've been on - I know they've broken down now and are off it - but they wouldn't have not wanted to get on it.'
If Holloway wasn't patrolling the touchline at Bloomfield Road, he could easily be appearing on stage down at Blackpool's north pier. He is the great comedian of English football, the man with the legendary one-liners.
The man who conducted his team talk on the floor of a hotel in December using 22 teddy bears he had bought out of his own pocket from a local pub in aid of a children's hospice and introduced the 'arse of the week' award in training at Plymouth by poking a plastic backside through a hole in a pair of shorts.
The man who reacted to two Blackpool players being sent off against Ipswich in January by flinging his hat, scarf and coat towards the opposition full back, claiming he would be cold having nothing more to do, and then admitted missing the opening goal at home to Sheffield United because he had nipped to the loo.
Holloway truly is a one-off. But the 47-year-old from the West Country is not, he insists, a clown.
'All I've tried to do is embrace it in my own quirky way,' he says.
'That doesn't mean I'm not totally serious. If I wasn't you couldn't give me a multi-million pound company and I wouldn't be able to enhance it and make it better, and make the people who support it actually start believing in things.
'Does that make me a clown? I don't think so, but you can think whatever you like - you pay your money, that's your choice.'
Holloway simply has a different perspective on football from his peers. It is perhaps forged from the experience of seeing his childhood sweetheart Kim survive non-Hodgkin lymphoma and having to cope with three of their four children being deaf.
'It's unbelievably rare,' he once said.
'Statistically we had the same chance of winning the lottery five times over.'
Asked once what he could teach his players from his own experience, he replied: 'That winners are made by not fearing. I can sense fear in the eyes of players. I could see it in Kim's eyes when she had cancer. I have dealt with fear all my life. My own fear has been a selfish dread that I might not be good enough.'
The obsessive pursuit of perfection may have waned but Holloway still demands high standards, as Blackpool chairman Karl Oyston found out when he first met him for talks at a Preston hotel a year ago.
The story goes that when Holloway arrived in a suit and tie to find his prospective employer wearing jeans, he threatened to walk out.
The chairman loved his spirit and gave him a one-year deal. Two months later, with little or no money to spend on new players, Holloway's refusal to accept second best again paid off. After showdown talks, Blackpool president Valery Belokon came up with £1.6million and the manager broke the club transfer record by paying Rangers £500,000 for Charlie Adam.
The Scotland midfielder has been hugely influential in the club's success, scoring 17 goals on the back of an attacking 4-3-3 formation. Holloway decided on the change of football philosophy during a year out of the game following his sacking at Leicester as he watched Spanish football on television and covered Roberto Martinez's Swansea City as a radio pundit.
'I watched only Roberto's team five times but they were an inspiration to me', says Holloway. 'I wanted my players to be the same.'
They struggled with it at first. So too the early-morning weight sessions and greater attention to nutrition and diet. Training was briefly moved from Squires Gate where the club have trained since Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen were in their pomp in the 1950s.
But since hammering Martinez's Wigan 4-1 in the Carling Cup early in the season, Blackpool have rarely looked back.
Holloway next faces the team he rejected as a boy in favour of rivals Bristol Rovers (he still dislikes red, Bristol City's colours).
The game also comes two years after he experienced his lowest point in management when Leicester were relegated from the Championship on the last day.
'You have to be able to deal with whatever life gives you and take it, embrace it and move on,' he said.
'But if we don't get into the playoffs now, I believe we would have failed.'
For Holloway, and Blackpool, it really is the big one.
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