Why Joe Garner is right to come back to Carlisle United one last time

Had the Blues been too concerned about trying to revive old glories, had Paul Simpson himself felt his Brunton Park past was too precious to rewrite, this club would most likely be playing non-league football today.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. But sometimes it does. If Joe Garner is as motivated as Simpson says he is to try and help Carlisle muscle their way into League One, then there should be no hang-ups about this deal.

Indeed, plenty of the instinctive excitement can be justified. Football remains a game of the heart as well as the mind, and Garner back in a blue shirt ought to trigger both.

As ever, it will ultimately boil down to the pounds, shillings and pence of what Garner puts on the table. The currency of goals, and the ability to scatter a few defences along the way.

In that respect it won’t matter whether he’s played scores of games for United before, or hasn’t at all.

Both Garner and Simpson have had previous spells at United (Image: Amy Nixon / CUFC)

In another respect, though, it will. It’s a less tangible one, but it can quite clearly be powerful.

When Carlisle reappointed Simpson, after all, they weren’t just dialling the number of an accomplished manager and coach. They were reconnecting with someone who knew the place, who had a feel for its strengths, weaknesses and long-standing eccentricities and hang-ups.

READ MORE: Carlisle United confirm signing of Joe Garner

Sometimes it’s right to let history hook you back this way. Sometimes it’s right, as we’re clearly seeing with Garner, to go back to a place where the love is on some level still strong, the connection immediate, the muscle-memory good and long.

The striker is far from the first player to come back for another go, although the list of those who have done so several times is shorter – yet still illustrious.

The club’s very greatest player, Hugh McIlmoyle, returned not once but twice, in the 1960s and 1970s. Bryan ‘Pop’ Robson was also back like a boomerang for three spells in the 1980s.

Pop Robson, third from left, is another player who had multiple spells at Carlisle (Image: News & Star)

More than 16 years will connect Garner’s first debut – as a loanee in January 2007 – with his latest. United are plainly not, here in 2023, getting that 18-year-old with elastic in his legs and gunpowder in his boots.

They are, though, getting a player who knows course and distance, who has spent most of his career scoring goals at higher levels, who might not play each and every 90 minutes between now and May but will know exactly what to do when called upon.

And who will do so with some of the force of terrace support applied to everything Simpson has done since last February, when he came back to the future.

It is plain that Garner is in the autumn period of his career, yet don’t those thorny six-pointers between now and May 8 - of which there’ll be many - feel just a fraction more doable knowing United have such a well-travelled centre-back-botherer in their ranks?

Joe Garner has been a menace to defenders all his career (Image: News & Star)

Don’t you feel that a side that’s young in many places will appreciate having someone up top who is as effective in the shady margins of a game as anyone in the lower leagues?

Don’t you imagine that they’ll enjoy knowing there is someone like Garner who can dish it and take it, draw attention and anguish from opponents, and allow those young talents extra freedom?

Don’t you also think that a striker of Kristian Dennis’ form and space-finding attributes will already be figuring out how to make the best of whatever consequences Garner can create in your average League Two game?

The cold numbers this season suggest someone ready for a move, a new challenge. Garner has three goals from 24 Fleetwood appearances, after five in 19 last season.

As such, he may not be United's prolific spearhead now. Yet he may not need to be.

Can Garner achieve the Untied promotion denied to him in his previous spells? (Image: Barbara Abbott)

If he comes and plays like Joe Garner on some level always did, that may be enough. Carlisle are, you have to feel, a little more tooled up today.

So let us fantasise. There is a sweet image out there of Garner with a promotion medal around his neck, some 15 years after an untimely knee injury cost him the chance to fire Carlisle into the Championship.

Well, if you can’t dream those dreams, what’s the point?

A great deal has happened since 2008, to club and player. Yet, as Joe Garner’s new manager could comfortably remind us, some things never truly fade.