What did Courtney Pitt ever do to Oxford? He played just five games for us and yet he’s been vilified for it ever since.
Pitt’s problem was that he was Graham Rix’s man and embodied everything Rix stood for. Rix himself was the great white hope who would take us to the Promised Land. He took over from Ian Atkins who, though successful, was too agricultural for Oxford fans. But with Atkins addressing our prolonged slump, Rix was scheduled to continue that work but more in the traditional Oxford style.
Not only was Pitt the embodiment of Rix on the pitch, he was a winger and wingers are a Us fans’ wet dream. He was rubbish, he wasn’t the first rubbish player to pull on a yellow shirt, nor was he the last, but because he was Rix’s man, because he was a winger, and because he was unable to herald this new dawn, he‘s been hated.
What’s more, he occasionally reappears at the Kassam. At first, he was still rubbish, then he looked competent, and now he’s looking a world beater. Courtney Pitt (and an overweight Courtney Pitt at that) has proved our crap-barometer. We can check how bad we are, by judging how comparatively good Courtney Pitt got. I don’t blame him for goading the home fans during last night’s game. In the end we’re the losers, not him.
We’re looking marginally better each week, and perhaps deserved a little more that we got. Draws are often described in terms of who held who. The holder, being the weaker than the held. Last year, for example, Dagenham held us, had we drawn last night it would have been a case of us holding them. It’s a subtle thing, but there’s we’re still some way from us moving from being an improving team to a winning team.
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