What Are We To Do About Billy The Kid?

On whatever the day of the week it was when Norwich played between Christmas and New Year, just before the half-time interval, I summoned up the audacity to tweet something about Billy Clifford Gilmour. You might have heard of him, signed from a team somewhere in West London.

The tweet itself wasn’t hugely complimentary. The exact words were ‘I’m not sure Billy Gilmour is very good lads’. Now let me be clear, it wasn’t really a swipe at the player himself, more the situation he finds himself in and the deep and ever-widening chasm which exists between how highly Chelsea fans rate him and what Norwich supporters see served up on a football pitch.

It turns out the travelling support at Selhurst Park went a little further in their criticism (more about that later on), in among a sprinkle of gallows humour, pitch invading and some pretending that we’d scored a goal.

My tweet predictably drew some attention from Chelsea fans, lots of them with faceless accounts. Of course, most of it was witty commentary on how shit Norwich City were/are, and that because of this fact, Gilmour wasn’t able to flourish into the world-beater they all think he’s destined to be (and they might ultimately be proved to be correct if our borrowing of Harry Kane is any barometer).

Some of these (presumably) armchair Blues pointed to cherry-picked statistics to strengthen their hand, while others found arbitrary player ratings on a website most of us have never heard of, which seemed to suggest the Scot was our best player. But, in the words of Homer Simpson, ‘Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true. Facts schmacts.’

Of the statistics above, ‘ball progressions’ seemed to loom large, which I can only surmise means ‘passing the fucking ball forwards a lot’ to a layperson like me. Then there were completed passes. Something about tackling. The list went on and on. Of course, it willfully ignored what City fans had seen with their own eyes and have seen regularly this season; that Gilmour often concedes possession. Sometimes due to an over-eagerness to get his team on the front foot, other times due to his inexperience – but also because he is slight of frame and probably needs a midfield minder. It’s killing Norwich regularly, inviting pressure onto a reshuffled backline that is struggling to now defend its own box with any competence.

There is no denying the technical proficiency Gilmour has. We are continually reminded by sports news outlets that he has shone at the international level, albeit against some pretty average opposition (plus England). He constantly shows for the ball, giving players an alternative angle for a pass that has probably been ingrained into his footballing DNA during his time at Chelsea’s academy. He wants to take responsibility, primarily via his use of the football, but he also doesn’t shirk from a challenge when the situation presents itself.

These are all laudable qualities. Yet it doesn’t disguise the fact, coming back to my original tweet, that he hasn’t been very good this season. His strengths are clear to see, but his current deficiencies hurt us and he is by far the biggest offender. I’ll leave you, dear reader, to come up with the long list of other players that haven’t been up to the mark, but with half of the season gone, Gilmour’s report card would be marked with a D plus at best. In summary, he seems to have some of the qualities of a number 8 rather than a deep-lying ball winner or playmaker. He has probably felt the absence of Mathias Normann as keenly as anyone, but, even mitigating for that, he is nowhere near a player who should be a regular part of a Premier League XI.

His absence under Farke was the second massive elephant in the room next to a very trunky Cantwell. The fans clamoured for his inclusion, so the chanting directed towards the young man was slightly ironic but vile, and he deserved none of it. All it serves to do is whip up the LadSport TalkBible nonsense accounts and allows them to use it as fuel to play into the lazy myth that Gilmour is somehow too good for Norwich anyway.

He also can’t ‘fuck off back to Chelsea’ with any ease. According to most reports, the amount of appearances Gilmour has made this season means those in West London cannot recall him without the terms of his loan being renegotiated. As a result, we’re stuck with this unhappy marriage, and we’re just going to have to grin and bear it until the kids go to uni.

All of this is not to say Gilmour won’t be a fine footballer, given time in the correct setup and with the proper guidance, but he isn’t what Norwich City need now, he hasn’t been all season and he’s not the player we were told we were getting. That isn’t his fault, but a fault of recruitment, which seems to be an ongoing and worrying trend at the club when occupying a place in the Premier League.

And so it seems that, like everything over the last few weeks, there’s no real easy answer here. One can only hope that, with a now extended break before further league fixtures, Gilmour (along with the rest of the team) can hit the reset button and regain that fitness and find some form – perhaps with a new DM protecting him. Aside from that, there isn’t much hope left.