The Lounge

[Windlesham Don]

Bloomin’ publicity seeker! ;o)

[onyadon]

*Cough* THEY approached me….. 🙂

[liamwimbo]

Not confident but hoping to wake up to good news.
Hopefully the programme uses the word “Legend” when talking about the one and only Robert Smith!

[Cape Cod Womble]

Oh well at least it’s going to be better than my appearance o WDON a few seasons back after a few cleansing ales. John Green eat your heart out!

I’m going for a 2-1 victory to open our account against Scunny who I saw regularly a few seasons back.

[Singapore Don]

I am thoroughly depressed, but then I never take defeat very well. How on earth we didn’t get a point from that game is beyond me. That’s four games we’ve played well in now (well for a good chunk of each game), and four defeats. Clearly something is fundamentally wrong, something is not clicking, and it’s hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong. Our rock solid defence from last season is suddenly looking very shaky, though Barry Fuller had an excellent game tonight. Robbo and Charles are just not looking as convincing as they did last season, and it looked to be Darius who was at fault for their penalty. But the real weak link at the back is Sean Kelly. He did make one absolutely outstanding block to prevent a certain goal, so all credit to him for that, but otherwise he was off the pace, out fought, out thought, out jumped, out of position – he was to my mind a real liability. Jon Meades really cannot come back soon enough. If we’re going to strengthen in this August window, we need to get a replacement left back because we have been exposed for too many goals in that department.
Ryan Clarke had a much better game, and made a few decent saves, though he’s still inclined to stick to his line and not come out to command his box. His static positioning is concerning, but he looked much better tonight.
Reeves and Bulman had off nights for them, Reeves in particular in the first half was too often out muscled and outplayed. Dean Parrett coming on for the second half added real steel and attacking prowess to our midfield and has to be considered seriously I would have thought for a regular starting place. That’s two great games he’s had. Barcham had another solid game on the left flank, getting some good crosses in, but he was again bullied physically – hence I think the substitution of the second half when Parrett and Elliott were brought on.

My real beef of the night is with our forward line. Elliot had another great game, adding real threat up front in the second half, and one effort was very well save by the Scunthorpe keeper. But LTB didn’t really threaten on goal; Barnett, despite having a goal ruled out for offside after 15 minutes, barely threatened and was pretty invisible for much of the game; and Dominic Poleon also failed to hit the target in his brief Azzez style late substitution. I couldn’t see from the John Green stand, but friends up the other end in the Chemflow assure me the ref missed a stonewall penalty when Poleon was brought down in the box – so perhaps through no fault of his own he missed his chance to shine. Having said that, for the relentless pressure we put on the Scunthorpe goal in the second half – and it really was relentless, wave after wave of attacks, with the Irons barely leaving their half of the pitch – we still only managed to score one goal (and that was by one of our defenders). If our defence is wobbly, we need our strikers to be weighing in to do their bit, but their current misfiring leaves us terribly exposed.
I’m finding it very hard to be at all positive after that outing to KM. Yes we played well, but we played well at Walsall and against Bolton. We can’t just keep playing well and losing, we’ll drift away at the bottom of the table if we don’t turn this tide very, very quickly. One rumour doing the rounds at KM last night is that we’ll sell LTB to get some cash to strengthen our defence – perhaps another experienced but younger CB and another LB. But then again I’ve heard so many rumours, who knows?! All I can say is that Ardley has to do something pretty soon to stop this rot, otherwise heads will drop and points will be even harder to come by. The crowd stuck with the team tonight, singing throughout, and it was the rather dreadful ref who took the lion’s share of the flak at the end, saving the players from any fan fallout. We need a win, boy oh boy do we need a win, but it’s hard to see when we’ll get it – Northampton and Rochdale away are not going to be easy. I hate feeling this gloomy.

[Windlesham Don]

I share your pain Singapore Don, and broadly agree with your match summary. Personally I think that video footage proves that their penalty was a blatant dive (and right in front of the ‘assistant’). I didn’t have a good view of our penalty shout, but the players seemed to be livid and that is normally a good sign.

Of the players, Kelly is a liability, we need to get Meades back ASAP. Barnett was also disappointing, largely anonymous and shown up by the immense performance of Elliott when he came on. I can’t agree with Singapore’s assessment of Barcham, who I feel is a defensive liability, constantly out of position. He also runs down dead ends too often when attacking. Parrett was also excellent when he came on, displaying some guile and penetration missing from Bulman and Reeves – he must also start IMO.

The main concern on my part is the lack of guile or skill going forward. Our only attacking option is to lump the ball forward and hope that one of the front men get on the end of it. Teams will soon learn to counter this if we don’t develop a Plan B.

Things are looking grim for the rest of the season. We now have 4 defeats and all the Wembley good vibes have disappeared. Despite playing well for spells, we currently lack quality going forward and lack concentration and composure at the back. The call will be to spend before the window closes in a couple of weeks, but the bigger picture is that we need to save funds for NPL. I hope that we don’t splash the cash, but simply spend long hours on the training ground drilling the defence and gaining understanding up front.

If that is not enough then we can consolidate once again in League 2 with the prospect of NPL on the horizon.

[Author]

Posts