What If The Worse Happens? Part 1

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.

Who needs a "Plan B" when "Plan A" works so well?

Top 10 takeaways from the Legends game

• Despite sporting a belly that would earn him a good seeding at the World Darts championship, Shoey can still pull off a save. We suspect his pair of blocks in the first half probably gave him as much pleasure as any in his career!
• Guy Branston doesn’t really do friendlies.  Fellow legend or not, Aaron O’Connor needed to know who was boss, and the look on his face was a treat as Branno took the man not the ball in a late ‘coming together’.
• Big Ron is now Medium Sized Ron, but thank god still has the orange glow and miraculous combover.
• AOC hasn’t aged a day since he was last tearing up defences at Latimer Park; if anything he looked sharper – or maybe that was just how it seemed after a season of starvation rations.

A decent defensive combo

• Tark can still beat his man on the outside, with due allowance for the game being played at one quarter speed.
• The Latimer Park bobbles had done their homework on JP, and those hoping for a trademark bit of sorcery were disappointed… though there was one last glimpse of him falling and regaining his feet without losing possession.
• How the hell does Eddie McGoldrick look that young?

Eddie discusses the portrait in his attic with Flanny

• Team Glover/Ashby obviously leaned more towards Ashby on the tactics side, and spared puffing middle-aged fatties the task of chasing after long upfield punts.
• Brett has kept himself fit and looks ready for another five seasons or so, back in red.     
• The day was a huge success and everyone involved in making it happen should take a bow.  Now lets build on it by doing even more to celebrate our heritage – such as inviting other Legends back as matchday guests of the club on a regular basis, to wave to the fans, thank them for their service and keep the nostalgia flowing! 

King Roy, just about to drop back and lose his marker

Oh f********ck

Chester need to "box clever" in end of season fixture

 Chester have plenty to ponder.....

The league table doesn't lie.  We're up to our necks in the brown stuff.  No getting away from that fact.  The same league table also shows that Chester are going to finish third.  With 2 games to go they are 8 points behind Fylde and 10 points ahead of the County Bottlers (aka Brackley)  No matter what, they will have a home semi-final in the play-offs, with the prospect of a tough final away to either Fylde or Kings Lynn.  All very exciting for the Cheshire club.

It would be tragic for Chester were any of their slightly injured or fatigued players to miss out on the end-of-season excitement by being risked against the Poppies on Saturday.  Imagine how disappointed the club would be if 427 goal top scorer Holly Willoughby was kicked into touch repeatedly from the first to last minute by White and Gascoigne and was forced to hobble from the rutted, uneven, cloying Latimer Park surface?  Disaster!  Why risk their star players on our frankly lethal pitch, in front of our frankly lethal supporters?

Surely a more sensible strategy would be for Chester to rest, say, the entire first team, plus half of the reserves and fulfill the fixture in Northamptonshire with a collection of trialists, under 9's and blanks on the teamsheet?  Keep their all-conquering and almost unbeatable team safe and sound for the bigger games coming up in the weeks ahead.

It makes perfect sense to us.....

Come on Chester, wrap your stars up for
the more important games on the horizon

Damn you Mr Beattie!!!

Some of you might remember Mr Beattie.  I'm told he taught maths at the old Grammar School.  He may well have.  By the time he got around to teaching me he'd long lost any desire or love for imparting knowledge to eager young minds.  He'd mutter under his breathe, headbutt the blackboard and keep himself entertained by throwing the blackboard rubber at any talking or sometimes just breathing student.

Along with seemingly every other teacher working from the Stamford Road site of Kettering Boys' School, Beattie had well and truly given up any pretence of earning his salary by the time the Grammar school had reverted to plain old Comprehensive.  Even worse than him though were Mr Marriage and Mr Walner who "worked" out of the Boot and Shoe College on Thorngate Street.  They were well and truly Kings of their own Fiefdoms who's antics and would have made Ofsted explode if anyone gave a damn about children back in the 1970's.  I'm sure they had subjects they were qualified to teach but I have no recollection of what the were.  Neither did they I suspect.

The above paragraphs are a round-about way of explaining how poor my mathematics are - sorry Mr Sunak....and why it has taken pretty much until Monday to figure out that all Poppies fans need to become Farsley supporters for 24 hours.  After the mad last five minutes of Saturday's fixtures when Farsley and Blythe surrendered winning positions and Leamington lost in the 93rd minute, we got an incredible reprieve as we slithered to yet another easy away defeat.

Simply put, if Farsley beat Blythe in their re-arranged fixture, in order to overhaul our current total of 49 points Blyth will need to beat both Alfreton away AND Hereford at home.  Leamington, to pip us to the last safety spot would need at least a win and a draw at Fylde away and Southport at home.

And those results would only catch our current total of 49 points.  We still have 2 games too.  Unfortunately they are to a team who simply don't lose - Chester, and Kidderminster at Aggborough armed with our fantastic away form.

The maths gets simpler still.  If Farsley beat Blyth on Tuesday evening, and then on Saturday either we win or both Blyth and Leamington lose we are safe.  Nice, simple maths.

Christ alone knows what it means if Blyth win though....thanks to Mr Beattie's excellent mathematical tuition I should be able to figure out the possibilities by late June, early July at the latest.

I'm hopeful of being able to count soon
without mouthing the numbers as I do it....

Who's buying all the drinks in the last chance saloon?

Given the secular nature of our society (he says, munching on an Easter egg) we find it difficult to invoke the Almighty in our hour of relegation-threatened need.  Once upon a time we would have offered up prayers that we would beat Leamington tomorrow and then, somehow, follow that up with a win at Spennymoor.  But not now.  We've given up on Saints and Saviors.

These days we are more pragmatic.  Instead of praying to an unknown God we pray to known men who might have a few spare bob and the inclination to throw it our way.

Seemingly we are prepred to throw off a decade of good governance in order to bend the knee once more to a hoped-for sugar-daddy.  The thought of relegation is so incomprehensible to some of us that we would gladly see someone, anyone with cash to burn, acquire the Poppies and make everything good again.

Would we care who did this, as long as they could personally fund a future play-off push?  I doubt it.  If Kim Jong-Un or Gary Glitter promised copious investment and a guaranteed place in the FA Cup 1st Round Proper I fear we'd have takers.

Much like the softening of Stalin's reputation in post-truth Russia, the lessons we thought we'd learnt from Imraan's reign are being forgotten.  To rely on one man's wealth again would turn us from supporters to serfs.  Subject to the day-to-day whims of an overlord.

I hope with all my being that we can go out tomorrow and beat Leamington.  Then do the double over Spennymoor and have a great night after trouncing Chester in our last home game.  There is nothing I'd like more.  If it doesn't go our way and the worst happens I'm going to feel pig-sick for a long while.  Absolutely wretched.  But it's not going to completely eat me up.  When next season's fixtures come out I'll be ready to go again.  We've come back from worse and we'll do it again.  If football doesn't hurt you as much as it can thrill, you're not doing it right.  No amount of "investment" can guarantee a future free from pain.  The Poppies, better than most clubs should know this.

"How much for Frankie Maguire?"

Read all about it! If you can.

 

I only wish our defensive wall for
Scarborough's goal was as solid as
the ET's online advertising....