Last updated 09:47, Saturday, 01 November 2008

JOHN Ward almost had it this week when he put forward “if” as the biggest word in sport. Had the troubled Carlisle United manager tacked just three more letters on, he would have got right to the bone of his team’s descent from promotion hopefuls to relegation worriers.

Drift. When the chapter is scribbled on United’s autumn collapse in 2008/9, that word will be inked in at the top of the page and we can say that even if we’re now peering through hindsight’s lens.

What has swung back in the face of Ward and his team these past few weeks is an early-season failure to strengthen from a position of strength; the presumption that an encouraging start would roll out into a successful campaign without the significant additional help that most squads permanently require.

In other words, Ward waited until Carlisle’s late-summer form had jammed before making the loan recruits who are now attempting to drag the Blues from their psychological trough.

In other words, matters were allowed to drift, and the subsequent record of 10 games without a win which the Cumbrians lug down to Stockport today is the payback on that policy.

Remember those distant days (actually, we’re only talking August and September) when United were ramming in goals and dancing with the stars at the top of League One?

Now, imagine that Ward had delved into the market at the first opportunity during that spell, and persuaded a player of Graham Kavanagh’s grit and pedigree to join the pursuit at such a promising time.

Just think of the confident message that would have been fired into every corner of the division if Carlisle had marched untroubled towards the peak, and at that precise moment added even more strength and experience in the shape of the influential Kavanagh?

And consider what it would have told the midfielders in the United side at that time; namely, to raise their standards to an even higher point if they wanted to continue enjoying life in the front ranks of a high-achieving team?

Fine: perhaps a seasoned pro like Kavanagh might have recoiled from such a move had it not come with a guarantee of immediate first-team action. But the point about bolstering your numbers at times of strength applies across football and is most certainly grasped by the game’s most illustrious managerial names.

What we have had at Brunton Park, instead, is the acquisition of Kavanagh, Ben Alnwick and, this week, John Welsh, not as a means of improving an already formidable unit but as a dip into the phone book for a few repair men when the roof has started leaking (yes, Jennison Myrie-Williams arrived earlier, but more than a month on and we are still awaiting his first start in the league).

It is less a method of strategical strengthening than a sequence of hopeful lunges that has, so far, failed to add any kind of progressive coherence to Carlisle’s play, whatever the obvious qualities of the men involved.

All this is legitimate criticism. Certainly, it has nothing to do with the background rumble of briefing and counter-briefing which has needlessly undermined Ward this week; nothing to do with the nod here and shake of the head there which is hardly a sound basis for creating stability and harmony.

Those two qualities have sped away from Brunton Park in the last seven days and the suspicion is that it will take more than Wednesday’s club statement – hardly the most convincing declaration of faith that has ever been pumped out – to hook them back in.

This hasn’t been a famous week in the life of Cumbria’s only professional club. But let the politics be suspended this afternoon as Ward parts the gates at Stockport County and attempts, again, to convince us that Carlisle United’s progress under his command hasn’t become a long drift in the dark.