Couple of points upfront: -
1. Dan Holman is not solely to blame for our dip in form - his name just fitted the title best.
2. Yes, I'm a bit of a SF nerd, which I've managed to hide pretty well for over 1100 posts! If you don't recognise the reference, well, look it up. I'm not doing all the work for you!
I think it's fair to say that our season splits into two distinct phases. Before Dan Holman, and after Dan Holman. Again, this is absolutely no reflection on Dan, as he has personally played well and hit the net a few times.
Rather, he is a handy dividing point between the two Poppies styles of play this season. For the first dozen or so games the team played an incredibly fluid style that opposition teams simply couldn't live with. This style was in many ways forced upon us by the lack of striking options. With Rhys as a sole front man, our midfield of Kelly, Richens and Meikle, augmented by overlapping fullbacks Storer and Kelly-Evans completely flummoxed opposing defences. They had no idea where the next attack was coming from, or who to try to pick up. This middle five then formed a pretty unbreakable barrier the few times the opposition had the temerity to launch an attack themselves. I think it's fair to say that this style of play was mostly forced upon us by the personnel available to our management team than any great masterstroke of training ground brilliance by them. But boy. It certainly worked.
Then we started to acquire strikers. I fully appreciate it may sound incredibly ungrateful to bemoan the acquisition of players of the quality of Holman, Cunnington, and the returning O'Connor, but their shoe-horning into the team has heralded our stuttering over recent weeks. Each of these gentlemen would stroll into any team in this division, and perhaps even the division above, and I won't blame just them for our dip in form. They are strikers. Selfish, greedy goal-hounds by nature. That's their job.
I won't be so cruel to call it "a dip in form", more our "dip in invincibility" is the fault of Marcus and his management team. They seem so blinded by having such an enviable attack, that all the good things we were doing a few weeks ago have been forgotten.
Instead of a together team of infinite attacking and defending permutations we have reverted to a staid, very obvious formation. "These are our large number of strikers, please mark them. This is our overrun midfield, please pass through them. This is our suddenly exposed defence, please score past them." There is no more over-lapping forward play. Good players are looking exposed and tentative.
Worst of all, opposing teams have picked up on our staid formation, and sudden confusion in roles, and are seriously out-working us. They know that giving us no room and closing us down is killing us as an attacking force. This is how Stamford, Redditch, St Ives (FFS!), and Banbury have got the better of us in recent weeks. And let's be honest, had games against Royston, Rushall and Bedworth gone against us too, we couldn't have many grounds for complaint.
Bedworth in particular should have been a wake-up call to the management team. We were bossed for 85 minutes by a team without a single win this season. And if it wasn't for the fact that Iyeseden Christie's arse had inadvertently wandered into an offside position in the last couple of minutes, we would've left Bedworth with a solitary point.
With games against a resurgent Kings Lynn and a bitter AFC Scum-lite coming up I really hope we don't withdraw further into siege mentality, with aiming for Cunnngton's head our only method of relieving the invited pressure. Come on Marcus. We have quality through the team, and not just the marquee forwards. Time to let it shine again?
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