Now that the joy of the Legends Day is firmly in the rearview mirror we turn our reluctant attention to this Saturday. Aggborough. Kidderminster. And the fatalistic conclusion that we will be relegated. If both Blythe and Bradford lose we stay up. But does anyone really see this happening? Not many in the NN15/16 postcodes do, that's for sure.
This is the time of the season for the wide-awake at 2.00AM pondering of "what if's".
What if we'd acquired Jimmy Knowles a month earlier?
What if Frankie Maguire hadn't got injured?
What if we'd turned just one of our thirty-five 0-0 draws into a win?
What if. What if.
There's a lot of factors we can't influence. But, there's an awful lot we can. Patgod hasn't been especially critical of Lee Glover during his season here. Anyone with the barest, passing knowledge of the Poppies knows he was handed an uphill task when he arrived. We'd just had our highest finish in the table for 10 years. We wanted more of the same please.
Unfortunately we'd just lost a couple of managers who saw the club as nothing more than a stepping stone and had allowed most of our best players to drift away. The seeds for this season were well and truly sewn by Paul Cox and then watered and nurtured by Ian Culverhouse. And, if you'll forgive the endless stretching of the metaphor, Lee then had the job of weeding the resultant garden to see if anything worthwhile was still growing.
Lee built a limited but hardworking team. Sure, he tried out a few real duffers out but was canny enough to not let any of the dross get comfortable before they were heaved out. Case in point being the team that took to the field to watch Chester play a practice game at their place. We honestly had less passengers on the coach that day. The worst offenders were gone within the fortnight.
Given how quickly Lee assessed and dispensed of players not up to the task, he has let himself and the rest of us down with his unshakeable formation and game-plan dogma. Sitting back and playing one man upfront is a reasonable tactic when playing away from home, but sticking to the same formula at home as we racked up 0-0 after 0-0 is where Lee hamstrung our survival efforts.
While the teams around us picked up wins, some of them improbable, we had entire games without troubling the opposition goalkeeper. The three home games in a week against Darlington, Peterborough and Scarborough where a win against ANY of them would effectively secured our safety will live long in Poppies infamy.
Our only advantage as a club is our, ahem, unpredictable pitch. Did we play 2 or 3 up front and bombard these teams, who were already on the backfoot, happy to take a point? No. We tried to keep in tight and pinch a goal, relying on our solid defence to hold firm. Like that tactic has served us well this season.....! The only time we've changed tactics at home and attacked in numbers brought us goals against Boston, Chorley and Leamington. And in these cases, we had to. A coincidence?
Sorry Lee. We haven't got the greatest team in the Division and know and accept this, but timid tactics and far too many draws have brought us to this point. And that is down to you.
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Who needs a "Plan B" when "Plan A" works so well? |
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