Carlisle United: Success or failure under Mark Hughes? How to rate the Blues’ season?

James Phillips, BBC Radio Cumbria Carlisle commentator

Success or failure in football is hard to define in the era we find ourselves in, where social media has turned everything left or right, good or bad…

What happened to nuance?

That’s certainly true of the position Carlisle United find themselves in with head coach Mark Hughes, who’s taken his team into the National League play-offs with a club-record points tally, picking up the whole club after two consecutive years of relegation.

But he is still considered a failure by some and a dinosaur (in footballing terms) by others.

There can be no denying United under Hughes were a long way short of the division’s best two teams, York and Rochdale, along with Boreham Wood, who beat them in the play-offs and took four points off them in the league.

But these teams had built a way of playing carefully over time, signing players who fit the style and working them into the system, with patience.

Would the Carlisle fans have stomached spending two to three years in the National League building a style?

In truth, the season was a crossroads for the club, where in one direction was the pragmatic approach to winning that might yield an immediate return to the EFL

In the other, a longer path to becoming a team who played great football and eased into becoming the sort of winning machines we saw in York and Rochdale.

Which direction the club took with Hughes is clear and, in some respects, there was success. But there was also failure, in missing out on promotion.

The question now is, how do Carlisle take the time and patience required to build an attractive way of playing, when anything short of promotion is considered failure?