For twenty minutes tonight it looked like Plymouth 5 Cardiff 2 and Cardiff 0 Lincoln 2 had never happened. City were playing Barnsley off the park, they’d scored a really nice goal and the home side looked like they were going to take a beating to match the one they suffered at Cardiff City Stadium around six weeks ago.
However, out of nowhere, Barnsley came up with an equaliser which owed much to poor defending and we were never the same again. There was no more scoring after that and while a draw is not the disaster that some on the message board I use seem to think it is, we drop four points behind Lincoln who won 1-0 at Exeter and, currently, a single goal away win looks like something that is beyond us.
If a draw isn’t a terrible outcome, our performance in gaining it is concerning for a couple of reasons – firstly, the quality is just not there at the moment and, secondly, too many of our players are off form. Regarding the latter, some of our experienced performers (eg Calum Chambers and Chris Willock) have let their standards slip recently and Perry Ng was some way below the fine form he had been showing in the first half tonight especially and he has to carry some of the responsibility for the goal we let in – was he fully recovered from the illness which kept him out on the weekend?
Just like Saturday, it was hard to single out players who had a good game – Dylan Lawlor showed just how important he is to us through much of the first half, but, perhaps troubled by the hamstring issue that has limited his football since the turn of the year, he had his problems with the evergreen David McGoldrick after the break. I thought Calum Scanlon showed up well going forward down the left in his first start for the club – he certainly has pace and although he lost the ball cheaply in the build up to the Barnsley goal, he didn’t do too badly defensively.
Apart from that though, there were good moments from most of our players (for example, from three of them for our goal), but that’s all they were, moments.
I can feel myself going into negative mode here, so I should say that, while not at our best, we forced Barnsley back continuously in the second half, won a stack of corners and the fact that goalkeeper Owen Goodman was named as Barnsley’s man of the match tells a bit of a story.
To be honest, Barnsley were set up like an away team for most of the game as they sat back and let us have a lot of the ball. For a second straight game, we had seventy per cent plus possession (73/27 this time), but again, we didn’t do a great deal with it.
Rather like against Lincoln, your cause isn’t helped if you don’t have an aerial presence in the penalty area when you have a crossing opportunity from open play and it seems clear that there is an acceptance that the aerial cross is a bit pointless with the forward players we have available to us currently. By the same token, all of those corners I mentioned were not as useful as they might have been because even with our central defenders and Ng forward, we don’t have much of an aerial presence and so we are reliant on things like low crosses and short corners – it’s as if we don’t believe we can score from high crosses without Yousef Salech and maybe they’re right to think that.
Furthermore, both of the players we’ve used to lead the attack, or to play as a false nine at least, lately have had time out with injuries and neither of them look like they are fully up to match speed yet. For the second straight game, Omari Kellyman lasted less than seventy minutes, yet it would have been unthinkable to have seen him withdrawn with us not in a winning position, such was his form before the groin issue which saw him miss the Doncaster game.
On the other hand, Rubin Colwill has played the full ninety minutes against Lincoln and Barnsley, but he’s coming back after three months out and his form has been like a Curate’s Egg – good in parts, but also rusty in parts with a tendency to become careless with his passing.
So, daft as it may sound for the division’s leading scorers, we look a bit powder puff going forward at the moment – we’re seemingly restricted in the sort of service we can provide when crossing and the limitations of the false nine system, which worked so well for a while in Salech’s absence, is being exposed with the patchy form of the players chosen to fill the role not helping.
I’ve said once or twice on here that setting out to play in the manner BBM has wanted this season cannot be easy for what are only League One players after all and, in recent weeks, playing with a false number only adds to that feeling – credit to the players for managing so well for most of the season, but it’s looking hard work for them currently.
It wasn’t as if we weren’t getting shots in mind, Ollie Tanner maybe should have done more with a cross from Scanlon’s most impressive piece of play of the evening and the winger had a deflected shot turned aside by Goodman who also saved well from Rubin Colwill; and sub Cian Ashford in the second half, while another sub, David Turnbull crashed a twenty five yard shot not too far wide.
There was also an odd incident when Kellyman was clearly fouled as the ball was being cleared out of the Barnsley penalty area, but, after a delay when I began to think we might actually be awarded a penalty, referee Will Finnie (who I thought was pretty good otherwise) opted to restart the game with a free kick to Barnsley!
The home side will claim that they could have won it as well. Apart from their goal, Barnsley’s only attacking threat came from the 38 year old McGoldrick who got the better of Lawlor twice in the second half but could only send an attempted lob over the bar and then fire straight at Nathan Trott from the edge of the penalty area. However, McGoldrick was guilty of missing the game’s best chance which came in Barnsley’s dominant second quarter of the game when he blazed over the bar from ten yards out with no City player anywhere near him.
City’s goal was another beauty which saw Lawlor hitting an accurate pass out from the back, Alex Robertson switching play with a glorious cross field ball to Tanner and then the winger pulling back a neat low cross similar to the one he played to Kellyman for his goal at Rotherham – this time it was to Colwill who finished confidently with a low first time shot past Goodman from around the penalty spot.
Barnsley’s leveler saw Scanlon out of position after losing the ball, so there was plenty of room for them to attack down our left and Tom Bradshaw picked out Scott Banks on the far post who was left in total isolation to shoot past Trott from ten yards. Banks’ task was made a lot easier by Ng being drawn towards McGoldrick on the near post who was being marked by Ryan Wintle I think it was, so it was hard to see why our right back reacted like he did. It was another soft goal to concede and I’m afraid that spell during January and February when we were defending really well seems a long time away now.
The McGoldrick miss I mentioned earlier was very similar to the Barnsley goal as a home player was left to run down the right wing and cross low to the far post, this time though it was two onto one in the home team’s favour as Lawlor went with Bradshaw leaving McGoldrick totally free – Chambers and Ng only appeared in the picture seconds after the shot had cleared the bar, so I’ve not got a clue as to what was going on with the two of them.
So that’s our game in hand on Bolton gone and we’re now nine points in front of them with ten to play and a better goal difference – Bradford will also be nine behind if they win their game in hand at Port Vale tomorrow.
There was a very competitive game between two evenly matched teams at Cardiff City Stadium this afternoon where our under 21s came out on top by 1-0 against Charlton. A dull first half was followed by a much better second period and Charlton will I’m sure think they were unlucky to lose – that said, we defended better and better as the game went on with Alyas Debono in particular excelling. The decisive moment came early in the second half when a neat flick by Jake Davies, who rivalled Debono for the Man of the match award in my view, set up Mannie Barton whose shot from fifteen yards got a pretty big deflection to find the corner of the net.
I can’t argue with anything in this comprehensive analysis. Many thanks. One mitigating factor for the poor passing at times might have been the wind – particularly with the long balls down the line. I thought we looked jaded after the first twenty minutes and that Rubin in particular was sloppy at times and looked like he needed a rest. Perhaps his brother should have replaced him at half time but, that said, he perhaps he needs a rest too! NG was AWOL for their goal as far as proper positioning was concerned and we were somewhat lucky to get a point as the clearest cut chances were theirs. I am only based about 60 miles from Exeter so have been weighing up sitting in the stand and not shouting with watching our rugby team perhaps winning a game. A fit Salech would be a welcome sight but he should not be rushed.
Thanks for your points, Paul.
It was a game where three points did not deserve to go to either side. Scanlon’s seemed to be the pick of the City performances; I’d like to see both him and Bagan start the next game, with Willock making way.
Mike (Herbert) rightly points to the effects of the wind: all the more reason to SHOOT more and not pass sideways and backwards all the time and make us soporific. We could do with more efforts like Turnbull’s.
Regarding Lawlor: he is an interesting case. I see a lot of Alan Hansen in him: a most elegant runner with the ball, and a player capable of the sweetest of passes. But methinks he lacks Hansen’s bite in the tackle. Of our 4 centre backs, only one strikes me as someone who has the all round game to defend stoutly against a strong thrusting attack, and that is currently is Fish… though I wouldn’t bet on him either.
Oh and before signing off… pleased to see Trott’s distribution improve somewhat on his recent horror show, and talking of ‘horror shows’, Perry NG as usual was out of position when the opposition made sudden breakaways.
He is a gifted fellow (albeit one too prone alas to the dark arts and trying to get opponents booked) who can shoot from a distance and also be a real aerial threat in the opposition’s penalty area, and has a great engine on him that sometimes gets him off the hook when his positional lapses have momentarily caused his team danger.
The player he most reminds me of is a woman… Lucy Bronze.
TTFN,
Dai.
As ever, thanks Paul, for your summary of last night’s game. Having got back home at 3:30 am I am only now over the biting wind and freezing cold that inhabited Oakwell last night. Had I closed my eyes I could have been forgiven for thinking I was with Tenzing and Hillary atop Everest in 1953. If that is a tad too far fetched then I certainly could have been on one of the many research stations above the Arctic Circle. The weather was brutal.
To mention your well made point about full backs. To me, it’s not so much that they go AWOL, they are not day-dreaming of warmer climes for their summer holidays. That I would castigate them for, but rather the method this BB-M City in 25/26 plays is to deliberately ask our fullbacks to overlap the winger in front of them. There have been times it has worked a treat but equally it opens us up to a quick counter.
City started like Brazil during the opening 25 mins but ended the encounter a bit like Barrow. Well you get the gist even if Barrow is not the correct analogy. During that opening 25 mins we could have scored 3 or 4. A proven striker would certainly have added to our solitary goal.
But what a goal it was! Colwill expertly passing the ball into the net from Tanner’s cross. What joy, and probable relief, was exhibited from the 1,000 City fans who travelled.
Good that he can be, this was another one of his exasperating outings from Colwill (R). He really was unplayable in those opening 25 mins but then, too often, overdid things during the remainder of them game.
Unfortunately, despite total early control and virtually having wall-to-wall possession we became tentative and lacked precision in the final third. The Attack Momentum chart on Sofa Score certainly puts the 90 mins into perspective [ https://www.sofascore.com/football/match/cardiff-city-barnsley/yslb#id:15268381 ].
The referee, who has officiated at Championship level, generally had a good game. Just one surreal moment to report. After scoring their equalising goal, between the time of the ball hitting the net and restart all Barnsley players, apart from the goalkeeper, at varying speeds, trotted off to have their teddy-bear picnic-time at the dugout with their manager. Argh! Argh! All ten of them should have been booked! Are players so thick these days that they either don’t know or can’t think for themselves concerning what to do? I shudder to think what Jimmy Scoular would have made of this abject nonsense. This must be stopped by the authorities.
This season Mr Finnie reffed our Wigan (h) fixture whilst last season he officiated our last match at Norwich. Overall I though he did well in yesterday’s fixture.
Whilst 1-1 is better than a loss, with a little more care, we should have been going home with three points, though the hosts, admittedly, had chances to have won it themselves. Oh how we missed Salech tonight as we have during the last few games. As The Band, on their excellent album, ‘Cahoots,’ sang on the song, “Where do we go from Here?” … “You sure do miss the silence when it’s gone.” We sure do miss Salech.
It is mystifying why we need two defensive central midfielders against many of the sides in the Third Tier. Dispensing with one and playing a second striker would negate the amount of overlapping required of our fullbacks and surely we’d not be caught out so often on a counter down our flanks. Even against the incalcitrant Lincoln (at home) we would have been better served with a second striker. Of course it would also improve our goal scoring.
The last couple of games have not derailed us, neither have the management or squad lost the plot. Steady heads are required from one and all for the remainder if the season. Had someone said to me last summer, that after jetisoning 17 players and only a few new faces coming in, we’d be in this position with 10 games to go I would have jumped at it.
Another point brought up by the fixture yesterday was Barnsley’s excellent matchday programme, which cost the same as City’s [£4]. It put our effort to shame. Produced on shiny paper (compared to our poor quality recycled variant) with clear photos and easy to read print was a joy to read. In league terms theirs was top drawer for a Third Tier club. City’s non-league effort is an eyesore. And please don’t get me started on the iconic photos from the past seasons featured on the cover with present players’ heads being photoshopped on. What a scruffy and unprofessional progamme we produce.
Good evening Paul, and all your loyal subjects.
I have just been watching Sky Sports News cataloguing the latest examples of kamikaze football in Europe. Take Chelsea: having just fought back to 2-2 and with just 16 minutes left in Paris, insanity suddenly took over and ‘Rosie’ Rosenior’s obsession with his goalie playing out from the back produced its inevitable bitter fruit in the keeper having a funny turn and presenting a farcical goal to PSG… at which, the rest of his team’s morale immediately collapsed and instead of starting a second leg at Stamford Bridge with scores level, Chelsea now have to overturn a three goal deficit.
Sometimes I really despair of football managers… I really do. Every one of them seems to want to show they have been drinking deeply at the well of tiki-taka. The incomparable Marlene Dietrich version of the Pete Seeger song ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ echoes in my inner ear. I admire her (surely definitive?) version because of her clear thought that goes into her delivery of every word and her anger which comes to the surface in the verse of putting men in uniform [of tiki-taka] and her how the anger subsides to despondency with the final verse (a repeat of the opening one)… which makes it a circular song… which tells me we will never rid ourselves of this footballing curse.
The song is up there on Youtube covered by all my folk heroes, but I won’t post the link here, as I have found if I post more than one link, my comment will not get immediately up there with the rest of my MAYA friends, but will ‘await moderation’. But just google her at the 1963 Royal Variety Performance… as a 16 year old I watched this on our 14 inch telly and was moved by her fantastic performance.
I want to say ‘Chapeau! to Steve for making the journey to Barnsley… particularly in getting home at 3.30am. But if it is any consolation to you Steve, the OAP ‘Kipper’ one of my favourite regulars in Pieface’s vlog, tells us in the latest vlog just dropped, that he will get home at 5.45am from his trip in the Banana Bus to Wigan… where you will note they won 3-0 and are nearly jostling for a playoff place. And the reason? He apparently lives way down in Newquay…
https://tinyurl.com/26k2cx64
And I was fascinated by Steve’s reference to artificial stoppages in games. My bête noire is goalies going down with cramp… obviously they cannot be made to leave the field for 30 seconds… or hey, maybe they could? That would certainly stop this shenanigan recurring so regularly these days: indeed in that Pieface vlog just linked, you will find him laughing at the Plymouth keeper going down precisely on the 20 minute mark… as he has done nearly every game this season.
And Steve’s wise words as to the declining quality of football programmes… well they really touched a nerve.
Go back a good ten years and you will find I wrote a long piece here on MAYA about my passion for collecting programmes as a boy… I would write to football clubs sending an SAE and they would send me free programmes as a PR gesture.
I tell the tale of how when I got to about 23, completely under the spell of 1 Corinthians 13:11, which states, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things”… I foolishly gave away my collection of a couple of thousand programmes to a boy who never really valued them and who ended up in prison… but I hung on to just one… one I had kept in tissue paper and charged fellow City fans in Porth for just glancing at, like it was the Turin Shroud… that of the 1927 Wembley triumph.
But when in 1987 the Echo brought out a facsimile of the actual programme for free that was so faithful to my mint condition original (the single programme that I had held on to for the previous 17 years after my mad generosity in divesting myself of all my programme haul) that the only way I could differentiate between the two was the ever-so-slight rusting of the two staples that held the pages together on the original. So thinking as the bachelor I was at the time… if I drop dead and they clear my house… it will probably end up in a skip. And so I sold it for an embarrassingly small sum… at least ten times less than it would have got in auction, I later discovered.
But hey, that is not why I write this… I write because of Paul saying that if we and Lincoln go up, he will see us playing in Tier 2 for the first time in his lifetime as a supporter. Well, Paul… I speak as someone who saw The Imps in Div 2 in our promotion season of 1959-60.
And on 13th of Feb 1960, we entertained them and won 6-2. And as kids we would congregate before/after the game at the players entrance, where we would sometimes bump into visiting supporters keen to swop or sell programmes. And that particular day there was a tall boy from Lincoln aged about 16 who was selling previously unsold Lincoln City programmes, all featuring the nonpareil Lincoln Cathedral on the cover.* He was selling at cost price… and I bought three. I gave him a florin and he gave me a threepenny bit in change. I gently remonstrated with him… saying that for 9 pence expenditure I expected one shilling and threepence in change. He was adamant he had not cheated me… trouble was that I could not understand a word he was saying… he seemingly had the same medical condition I now detect in that Rosie Jones lady who appears on the telly. And I am ashamed to say – seeing I was nearly 13 years old – that I was on the verge of tears at being short-changed a bob, but fortunately the seller must have had some sort of minder with him, a middle-aged man (parent?) who saw the mini-commotion and could see I was speaking the truth (why else would my eyes be filled with tears?)… and the fellow got the seller to cough up my shilling.
Funny how Paul’s reference to the possibility of seeing Lincoln in the 2nd tier… worked there like Proust’s madeleine cake on me…
*back in 1971, I spent 4 months as assistant warden at York Youth Hostel, and I have to tell you that York Minster gets five times the number of tourists that Lincoln gets. But it cannot hold a (cathedral) candle to it… for 237 years, Lincoln Cathedral once was the tallest structure in the whole wide world.
And the great polymath John Ruskin put it best… ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’.
TTFN,
Dai.
Jeez… so many errors. Apols, Too many to list, but the most obvious… and glossing over clumsy lapses like ‘and her how the anger subsides’… (for ‘and how her anger subsides’) has to be keeping the 1927 Cup Final programme in tissue paper (sic)…!! Eh? What good would that do it? I meant in a ‘window’ made of greaseproof paper, so no kids hands could touch the pages. I did not know of white gloves back then, and if I did, I am fairly sure that Hodges in Hannah Street, Porth did not sell them.
D’ya know something… it is a good job I do not believe in what George Carlin, my favourite comedian who ever lived, called ‘the invisible man in the sky’. Because if I did, I’d be bound for Hell.
That programme was given to me aged 15 by Mr Handel Jones of Charles Street in Porth… the next street to mine in Birchgrove. It was not long before he died. He had kept it in mint condition since buying it outside Wembley back that day in 1927.
And I go and sell it 26 years after he gave it me, for thirty pieces of silver.
That fact has haunted me all these years since 1987… he had given it me because he knew of my love for ‘the City’ and my obsession with collecting football programmes. So he thought it would be going to someone who would revere it.
Shame on me.
DW
Cheers Paul. Once again a match report well worth reading and a number of good points raised about our performance. Apologies, as I’m a bit late to the party with my reply.
You mention that we had a number of corners (13) during the game, (especially in the second half – 8 ) Did this reflect our attacking intent? Although you correctly make the point that we don’t have a great aerial presence, to me, it’s frustrating that our delivery from corners is so abysmally poor. Even our short corners serve a degree of frustration, in that a number of times we don’t even end up getting the ball into the box. This was just not last night but has been a factor for a lot of our games this season. We rarely seem to score from corners and numerous times we seem to get caught on the break from them too.
The Barnsley match also highlighted our inability to break down another resolute “10 men behind the ball” defence, just like the Lincoln tactics, the other week. I happened to be watching the Arsenal game against Leverkusen last night and whilst I can’t say that our players are in the same class, it was interesting to see that Arsenal too, had immense difficulty in breaking Leverkusen’s “10 men behind the ball defence”. A dubious penalty was one of the few opportunities that Arsenal came up with. Maybe we shouldn’t get so frustrated when we see our players in the same boat. Lol. However, I think we should use a player like Joel Colwill, more in these situations, as he seems to be one who can “drive” into the area and perhaps buy a penalty from the crowd of defenders.
I just hope that we can overcome these blips along the way and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a great result at Exeter and in the remaining games.
Iain you bring up the question of our attacking intent. Perhaps these statistics may offer an answer. City figures first:
Possession: 73% to 27%
Passes: 609 to 227
Accurate Passes: 85% to 63%
Shots on Target: 4 to 2
Entries into Final Third: 88 to 43
Touches in Opposition Box: 34 to 14.
Steve,
There is nobody that I know of in the MAYA universe who applies himself more diligently in pursuit of statistical truths than your goodself: not even our Governor… and I commend you for your considerable efforts.
But just as politicians of all stripes can present the same stat in a different ways so as to promote their case, the same is true of football fans.
But before I come to that, a word re Iain’s suggestion that Joel Colwill might have been the man for the occasion. Yep… I think he is on to something there… he has got forward thrust in the final third, and has a deadly eye in his armoury. We all remember his superb shot from that corner played him along the turf by Robertson against Wimbledon. I think Iain will agree that this was a case of a City corner coming up trumps.
But now to the subject of stats generally…
Perhaps my MAYA brethren would say expectedly, when I read of our ‘609 passes’ and the fact that they were apparently 85% accurate… that I would be singularly blasé about the implied correlation between the two.
Why? Well because a staggering number of those passes were safe and square and uncontested by Barnsley… and a damning figure of 100 of our passes were indeed BACKWARDS.
And as for our ‘successful final third passes’… I note they were 149. But is that something we can boast about, when we only have 13 efforts on goal all game, and only 4 on target? No, of course not.
To me… that simply shows we are trying to walk the ball into the net Arséne Wenger style… but without his stars to perform the magic.
Paradoxically, a night when it was very windy was the ideal night for shooting: all the more reason to aim that ball at the keeper’s chest (no higher) and rely on the wind to turn it into a worldy… or the natural movement of the modern football in the air to at least cause the goalie to fumble.
One had the perfect view from the Sky camera of the way David Turnbull addressed the ball for his long-range effort… he hit the ball admirably hard, but clearly aimed for the inside the side netting of the left of the goal… but thus had predictable results… alas, the shot will never attain William Tell accuracy on such nights: the apple population of Oakwell will be guaranteed safety.
I have commented before re stats, on our strange MAYA desire to correlate the number of fouls a team commits in a game to the number of yellow cards that team receives. To me the two CAN indeed be related, but in no way are we victim to a refereeing howler if say the opposition commit 10 fouls and we commit 6, yet we receive 2 yellow cards to their none.
Surely it depends upon the nature of the offences?
Statistics are sometimes as irrelevant as the blush on a dead man’s cheek.
DW.
Dai, I don’t disagree with a word you have written about stats. True, stats can be used to say what you want them to. They can also be trotted out as a form of football snobbery eg: ” We had 800 passes to your 260 passes.” Thus implying we are a better team. Of course it doesn’t. If 40% of those passes are deep within your own half you are not going to score from them. In short, stats don’t win matches.The only stat that counts is the final score.
However, in the defence of the Sofa Score Attack Momentum chart (yes, a ghastly title but linked in my original post) that is a different animal viz the longer the bar the greater the pressure exerted further forward by a team. Again, entries into the final third and touches in the opposition box are self explanatory.
In seeking to get the feel of a game I’ve not been present at it is those three stats are the most relevant to me and take out of the equation passes deep within a team’s own half.
Thanks all, a few thoughts below on issues arising from your replies.
I’ll start with stats because it’s a classic case where, in relation to the Barnsley game, I can see both sides of the argument. To be honest, you didn’t need to refer to the match stats to gauge City’s attacking intent on Tuesday. Apart from the second quarter when Barnsley were on a high after their unexpected equaliser, City were always the team trying to force the issue and show attacking intent. However, the match stats were skewiff on Saturday because, for all that it could said they favoured us, the evidence of our own eyes said that we gained little or nothing from all of the ball we had. The stats against Barnsley were not as one sided and yet they never established the level of control Lincoln did.
For me, our last two matches have seen us struggling, unsuccessfully, to break down a heavily manned defence and I believe our task has been made that much harder because, as alluded to in my reaction piece to the Barnsley match, the number of ways we can attack are restricted by the injuries to two of our forwards – I’d also add that, like one or two others it seems, I was very surprised that Joel Colwill was not used on Tuesday because he’s arguably the best we’ve got at making the sort of runs into the penalty area that are not detected by opponents until it’s too late.
So, I feel that our last two games especially have offered proof of the dangers of placing too much emphasis on stats – there can be no doubt that Lincoln deserved to win despite what the stats might tell us and, although I think we might have got the verdict on a split decision against Barnsley if football matches were decided by the same method as boxing matches which go the distance are, a draw was a fair outcome.
Iain, I’m being serious here when I say that while you clearly need to make allowances for the different levels they play at, I think this season’s City side play the game in a much more attack minded way and we have a desire to entertain if possible in a way that Arsenal do not. As you rightly say, Arsenal were faced with the same set of problems on Wednesday as we’ve faced in our last two matches and, despite having all of their first choice attacking players available (apart from the injured Odegaard) they really struggled to make all of that talent count in a game where they had to rely on a contentious penalty to avoid a defeat.
Arteta’s Arsenal should win the Premier League this season, but this week’s Champion’s League results add weight to the suggestion that it is hardly a vintage year for the “best league in the world”. If Arsenal end up as Champions, it will largely be on the back of, first, their defence and keeper and, second, on their set piece goals, but they’ve been oddly ineffective in much of their attacking from open play given some of the players they have to pick from – when I look for a reason as to why this should be, the manager’s cautious approach seems as likely an answer as anything else to me.
Finally, a word about match programmes. It’s no surprise whatsoever that we have a few past, or maybe even present, collectors among us and I’m sure it’s not a shock to learn I was one as well. However, with very few exceptions (e.g. Cup Finals and promotion winning games), I’ve not bought one for almost forty years. It was the arrival of fanzines and magazines like When Saturday Comes which ended my infatuation with programmes. In the late eighties, we were in the early stages of a fifteen year period where we played a game of snakes and ladders involving the third and fourth tiers without any suggestion whatsoever that we could make a return to the second level – basically, we were crap and we could all see this even if the club’s programme kept on offering sanitised, don’t tell it like it is accounts of recent games and our prospects for the future. Fanzines didn’t have to play such games, they echoed my pwn thoughts on the club and something like when Saturday Comes often gave better, more informed and realistic accounts of what was happening at a particular club than you were ever likely to see in the national media.
Nevertheless, i was heartened to read Steve praising Barnsley’s programme – it was good to hear of a club making an effort with their programme at a time when too many others have ceased producing them as they, apparently, figure that they’re not required as all of the sort of things that used to be in a programme can be accessed on club websites these days. I’m not so sure about that and strongly suspect that the real reason why programmes are no longer produced by some clubs to be finance related.
As for our programme for this season. there’s not much I can say about it really as I never read them – I have seen this season’s covers though and agree with Steve, they don’t really work do they. Therefore, I fully accept any charge of hypocrisy when I say that the potential demise of the match programme saddens me while also conceding that it’s probably people like me who will be the cause of it if and when it happens.
I’ve paused to think before writing.
Firstly, there’s no shame in an away point on a wind-swept (and snow-swept for a bit) freezing cabbage patch up north. It was just the nature of it that troubles. All the possession in the world means nothing if half of it is sideways and back, corners are fruitless, half your teeth seem pulled and you’re leaving yawning gaps at the back.
Which of us would bet on our renowned chokers from blowing a lead of 9 points over 10 games? Bolton and Bradford could easily win their next 3 games: Bolton v Rotherham, Doncaster and Port Vale, Bradford v Wigan, Mansfield and Burton. Worst case scenario, then, how many points will we lead by with 7 games to go? No question, I think we’ve got to break free of this rip current now before we are carried away by it.
Exeter away tomorrow threatens to be far from easy. 10 men behind the ball, catch us on break or corners or long throws. It worked for Lincoln, it worked for Barnsley, it’s even working at the top of the Prem!
So what do we need tomorrow? Well, passion, for 90 minutes not 20, for a start! Especially from Kellyman who, in the continued absence of Salech, simply must break the lines. Is he carrying an injury though? Is Joel Colwill? If not, I can’t for the life of me understand his recent omissions. For the rest I don’t care who BB-M picks. They’ve all shown they can do it. They’ve just got to do it tomorrow!