Why Jack Armer was a model Carlisle United signing

As now, United were backed by a very wealthy man with many millions to his name. Philip Day, though, was not paying for a big renovation of Brunton Park. There was no talk of a new training ground, or a “step-change” budget.

Instead, Chris Beech had been brought in as head coach with a remit to work on limited resources, to spin gold out of straw and sell some of that gold for a good price, and hope results could stay above the waterline at the same time.

This, in the Edinburgh Woollen Mill period, was how United were going to move away from the Las Vegas days of Keith Curle’s bonus system. Their cloth would have to be cut differently, and they’d simply have to put something together based on what they could find in Poundland as opposed to Waitrose.

Now, that may not have been an avenue to promotion (although it nearly was, in 2020/21), and such a culture put a premium on recruitment of a certain kind. It tested the aim of those behind it in a way clubs with comfortable budgets do not experience. It narrowed the margin for error. Yet if there were inevitable misses, there were still one or two surefire hits.

With Armer, United hit the bullseye. In their circumstances, from then to now, his signing has to go down as one of the best pieces of business the club has recently done.

If, following Armer’s transfer to Burton Albion, there is now a degree of revising going on in some quarters, on the back of a League One season which did not put player or team in bright lights, then there should be, in response, a greater appreciation of the fuller picture.

Armer joined United in the summer of 2020 after leaving Preston (Image: Amy Nixon / Carlisle United)

Armer, it has to be said, gave Carlisle outstanding returns. In four seasons he accumulated 172 appearances. To have reached this figure at just 23 is achievement in itself.

It illuminates a body of work which can be hellishly hard to put together in the lower leagues, with its annual cycle of ins and outs and confident decisions one day screwed up and thrown in the waste paper bin the next.

Armer’s tally of games for the Blues, from the age of 19 until this spring, outstrips those of a number of men whose respective spells at Brunton Park were said to be durable, special or in some cases both.

Joe Garner, for instance, will always know a degree of reverence at United. Over four different periods, he gathered 119 appearances for the club.

Kevin Gray: 145. Keiren Westwood: 153. Karl Hawley: 137. Jamie Devitt: 130. Michael Bridges’ star burned for 65 games across two spells. Luke Joyce, a consistent and long-lasting figure if ever there was one, played 171 times for Carlisle.

For Armer to have pulled on United’s shirt more often than each of those figures is a mark worth respecting. Not that you only gauge a player on arithmetic. Quality always beats quantity. Yet you don’t play four seasons solidly, selected consistently, as a favour or as a fluke.

Very often you don’t do that at all after joining a League Two club of uncertain prospects at 19. Quite a lot, as a modern player, you’ll also have an injury or two: a twanged hamstring, a dead leg or three, something worse.

Armer, then, passed the robustness test at Carlisle too, a player who had never made a first-team appearance before his United debut at Oldham Athletic on September 5, 2020 proving, incrementally, that he was built to last.

He saved United, since then, the stress of overhauling at least one problem position in their squad. Before he was 20, he was testing Beech’s first-XI faith in Nick Anderton, his captain. Armer got into the side, first as an auxiliary right-back, then on his natural left. He remained there for the majority of that and following managerial eras.

Some 28 games came in his first campaign. Then it was 48. Then it was 53, and then it was 43. This covered the Icarus days of Beech’s reign, the sad Millen cameo, the Simpson surge and then the League One struggle.

And if Armer was not glittering in 2023/24, who else at United was? Can it be said of any single player that they lit up League One on a sustained basis? Can it, therefore, be honestly concluded that Carlisle have, all in all, lost a good and dependable servant to Burton, one they've signed, developed and sold all in model fashion, however much they hope and think they have recruited better with their Piatak wealth?

United hope Cameron Harper will prove a positive successor to Armer on the left (Image: Ben Holmes)

Few, in a polarised world of opinion, like to give credit to things they prefer to write off entirely. The Beech-David Holdsworth transfer regime ultimately led Carlisle to struggle. The EWM/Purepay legacy was a sorry scrap for the club’s Football League status.

Yet, amid the clouds, there were still a few bright rays: Jon Mellish (a Steven Pressley signing), Callum Guy, Jack Armer. Players who’ve given their fair share and more to United’s cause, having joined the club in unpromising times and well before a new dawn was being painted by American suitors with big vision and deep pockets.

This summer, things are different, given the outlay on such as Charlie Wyke, the eagerness to offer longer deals, the ability to get involved in tougher arm-wrestles for targets, the undoubted knowledge – as Bradford City’s Jamie Walker recently put it – that they are “giving it a bit of a go”.

May the fruits of all that be plentiful. And if their latest glut of arrivals deliver half as much value as Jack Armer did, from a much less lucrative starting point, then they’ll be doing some very good business indeed.