In a way, it’s appropriate that, exactly one year on, winter has suddenly got its teeth into Carlisle United: temperatures plummeting, surfaces hardening, training the usual logistical challenge around this time of year.
One day, if all goes to plan, this will be less of a problem under the Piataks, and for good. When the Blues are no longer hobbled or hindered by a touch of Arctic weather, we’ll know they are in a brave new future indeed.
That future remains very much part of the picture, part of the vision; central to it in fact. United have edged closer to it throughout the first 12 months of their American ownership. A vast new training complex, including modern indoor facilities, was never going to be a short-term gain. Its place on the project list, though, highlights better than anything the idea of what Carlisle aim to become.
It also demonstrates that this is a long-haul job, something requiring stamina, patience and detail. Football often seems a world of short-term panic and fret. The Piataks’ clear sight on the bigger picture continues to make them era-changing owners for the Blues.
Since November 22, 2023, when United’s horizons appeared to widen suddenly and dramatically, the first 365 days under the Florida family's Castle Sports Group has been a story of remarkable development in terms of infrastructure and foresight, coupled with awkward transition and struggle on the pitch; a few necessary re-statements of intent and, one imagines, one or two bruises to tend to as well.
Off the field, Brunton Park, the old girl, has been given some spectacular new clothes. Many times in its days as a blue-seated shell we were told that there was little to be done with the East Stand, that sorting out its interior was a job too big, that all that space would just have to be left, because there was nobody willing or able to make it work.
Enter the Piataks. And look at it now. If football must always come first at any club it would be harsh to view the transformation of the stadium’s biggest stand as in some way an expensive distraction.
Equipping Brunton Park with proper lounges and hospitality facilities is, in fact, very much about modernising the place with the growth of the club, football and all, in mind. It is very hard to view the kitting out of executive boxes, left humiliatingly vacant since the East Stand opened in 1996, as anything but an overdue and highly welcome move: something which always felt elusive, yet is now here.
This was always going to take finance and it was always going to take foresight. This has been the best of the Piataks: setting high aims and also short deadlines. Brunton Park, over the summer, was a building site and then some. Now it’s looking, in more areas than ever before, the part.
This is not a wealthy new ownership playing with its toy but fitting it out appropriately. Supporter areas have been improved, fan zones enhanced, the Neil Centre spruced up, new ideas tried, others on the list, millions spent. Let’s give the Piataks appropriate credit for such work, not just take them for granted now it's been done. How many regimes have we had without this level of improvement and change?
It has been an uplift, blatantly, to Carlisle United. Who would not want or embrace this? The Sheepmount training ground project has, no doubt, been a matter of slower progress than intended, the Piataks having to negotiate the byways and hurdles of local government involvement. They’re getting there, though.
These things deserve to be said without apology at a time the football has been much more challenging and flawed. The colour of the Piataks’ intentions should matter in bad times as well as good.
And so, to the bit on the pitch. Oh yeah, that. This is one area where United’s owners have found the business of sorting things out a more tangled and unpredictable matter. This has required judgement calls the kind of which can vex much more experienced club chiefs. The debate can rage into the night about how well, or otherwise, they’ve made them.
Whichever view you choose, the alternative breathes down its neck. It is easy to make the case that time should have been called on Paul Simpson’s management long before it was, as Carlisle skidded uncontrollably back down from League One after promotion, a January window of considerable recruitment only making results worse, the notion of United tooling up for third-tier football disappearing humiliatingly into the distance.
Changing up in the spring, say, rather than the end of August, could have made the subsequent time less of a scramble. It might have made 2024/25 more of an opportunity than an ongoing and concerning fight against a shocking second successive drop to non-league.
The Piataks were open and firm in their approach away from this. They felt there were mitigating factors to last season’s woes, such as a limited pre-season budget and the fact that Simpson – a view many shared, for a good long while – had, after all, wrought transformative change in results, mood and wider culture and spirit before, and therefore deserved patience unavailable to others.
It was not tinfoil hat stuff to assume he might turn it again, that a defining figure in United’s history might eventually find another way. If you were going to find reasons to give anyone time in that predicament, would you not do so for Paul Simpson at Carlisle United?
The new owners, then, deserve a forgiving reception for this. Some naturally disagree, and would have preferred a colder business ethic when it came to the matter of dealing with a losing team, a losing regime. So be it. That decision, like them all, is on the Piataks. But giving Simmo his due was not one, if we are honest, made by going stubbornly against a tide.
Mike Williamson, in September, was their first significant hire in this department, Simpson’s successor sourced from MK Dons, in part because of how stylishly they appeared to play when defeating a lumpen Blues in August.
Williamson pushes the Piataks’ buttons when they see a future in which Carlisle play possession football, develop through the thirds in the way other progressive clubs do these days. The idea is that this will be a more sustainable style if and when the Blues start to move up the EFL again.
Again, there is logic in this and in many ways is another sign of responsible ownership. What we have found, and what the Piataks have no doubt learned, is that the margin for error is ruthlessly narrow in the early days of such change, when the team being reprogrammed has had so many flaws, so much negative momentum.
United’s initial results under Williamson, after a first-game win at Swindon Town, were not good. Their performances offered elements of appeal but too many areas of concern. Who else would have salvaged an instant run of wins out of such a losing side is unclear. But, after games like AFC Wimbledon away, and Cheltenham Town at home, things seemed to be veering anxiously towards another change coming onto the agenda, however unwanted.
This may have been a test of the Piataks’ stomach (we don’t know to what extent). Their response, though, was a redoubling of faith in their man. This, frankly, is what you’d want from your boss if you were finding the start of a job tricky. A reputation as gunslinging owners, whose principles are as changeable as Groucho Marx’s, is not what the Piataks seek.
Yet a season is something of finite and steadily eroding time. The public statement of faith in Williamson, which Tom Piatak felt it right to make, needed to be followed by quick improvement and, critically, results. Finally such signs have begun to emerge. The head coach has made two free agent signings (Tyler Burey and Kadeem Harris) who have given the team some of what they’ve lacked.
He has not let any pride or stubbornness get in the way of a goalkeeping change which looked to the majority as something needed for the team’s benefit. United’s FA Cup first round performance against Wigan Athletic might, one hopes, be looked back on as the day some proper resilience, from Gabe Breeze forward, reappeared. In their three games since then, Carlisle have been more competitive and indeed unbeaten.
This buys Williamson essential time and takes the Piataks away from the teeth of panicked and worried criticism. Yet the likelihood is that the remainder of 2024/25 will be a stressful experience. United remain in the relegation zone, their squad still a place where another injury seems just around the corner, their best XI far from known or grooved yet. They are not an assured or clinical team when it comes to the taking of chances.
This is a place they must reach, enough at least to take them away from the fear of Eastleigh and Maidenhead and Wealdstone next season. How the Piataks would handle a double drop, and life in the National League, isn’t a question any of us want to see answered. There is no sign that it would be done with anything other than the same commitment. Yet it would also leave a deep scar, sink crowd numbers to some degree, render 'Own The North' a less convincing slogan and put back that bright future.
Instead, all involved must work furiously to make this season remembered for growth out of hard times, the first bricks and frameworks put in place from which a better Carlisle United can materialise. This also applies to the sporting director structure which now sees Rob Clarkson, formerly of Rangers, Manchester City and the Football Association, in place.
This is another case of United’s owners trying to catch the club up with many others in the game. The benefits in how Carlisle operate generally, as well as recruit, plan and grow more consistent/resilient, must become tangible over time. On Clarkson there will also be short-term demands, decisions and judgements, as well as wider wishes.
This, too, speaks to the immediate tension: can Carlisle be good enough right now, however thrusting they feel they can be down the line?
A hunch says the Piataks, after unlocking “step change” transfer budgets, did not expect things to go this badly, prove this troubled, on the pitch. We had the Liam Sweeting fiasco too in the initial sporting director search, where United were led so far down what appears, the more you look at it, the garden path. Welcome to the capricious world of English football, folks.
Yet we should not consider these vastly successful business people naïve, innocents walking towards mishaps blindfolded. What happened with Sweeting may have been a misstep but internally one senses it is seen as less embarrassing than from outside. Such is life, move on, find another solution and commit to it: better that way than losing collective marbles over the 11th-hour rejection of a would-be sporting director, whom none of us knew would be right or wrong.
Maybe this is too kind on a situation which did not play out well. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that always seems worse in the goldfish bowl. The Piataks, directly before the recent improvement on the park and before Clarkson’s appointment, have said less, been interviewed less. That implies a period of pain for the owners too. Yet their accessibility has been otherwise high-level, and ought to return on their next visit.
Wherever this season is going to take Carlisle, seeing and hearing from those at the top remains vital. In terms of engagement, most of the last 12 months have offered a major point of difference from the last regime.
Ultimately with owners it is not on day one that judgement comes, nor after year one. That day is far down the line, at a place we cannot yet depict. At this staging point, all in all, it’s enough to ask a few basic questions: are their intentions good, have they been true to their word, do they seem all-in?
A cynical person indeed would not answer yes to them all. This may have been a more testing and in some ways scalding footballing year than anyone imagined on that flag-waving day of renewal against Charlton Athletic last November, but Carlisle United under the Piataks remains a place of infinitely higher possibilities than without them.
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