Another lead blown and another poor result against a poor team in the bottom half. Had we beat Wimbledon, Plymouth and Gillingham at home then MK Don's today wed be 2nd in 50 points. Was hoping for better from Johnson if I'm being honest. Team selection and his lack of early changes today were poor
Well I have great pleasure in getting radjed about this result!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We beat these in a meaningless game on Tuesday and failed to gain 3 points in the more important game of the two! The Tin Pot cup should be done away with so we can concentrate our efforts on promotion!! BTW . Thought Jones looked OK. Hope he starts instead of O Brien in next match HTL
i think we still have some supporters struggling to accept where the club are now...our 1st season in division three we really were expected to blow the rest of the league out of the water...we still had premier league players ffs so we demanded better. right now we have division three players, we have (and have never had) no divine right to win games, most of the division see SAFC as the team to test themselves against so they 'up their game' to grab a mighty scalp...they are as guilty as some of our fans in thinking this way but it certainly does not help us as a club, i honestly get the impression that best part of the referees hold similar views, the amount of times i see constant fouls by the same players and not even a free kick is awarded, then one of our lads is a little late and gets a yellow is ridiculous. i believe we are only now starting to reach the right mentality for this league and am convinced this second half of the season will yield better results although i have to admit it has been, and is, a damn slow process!!
It's interesting to hear the oppo's views on the ref, usually both sets of supporters think they were biased towards the other team. I think it's true that other teams often raise their games against us but there's not a referees conspiracy to keep us in league one. They're ****e at refereeing every game in equal measures.
I hate to agree, but you're probably right. Simple incompetence. Plus a few L1 teams excel in the dark arts. The refs fall for it or are too weak to stamp it out.
That's probably what it mainly comes down to, teams that have been down here for a long time know how to game the system and we're still a bit naive, so the oppo win a few more free kicks than us and it kick starts the bias theories. Also all the gamesmanship bullshit winds us up more because we don't do it much and we give away more free kicks through frustration. Basically it's on us to get more savvy.
To state the obvious we are struggling to get in and stay in the play-off places. I suppose we just have to be there at the end of the season... so there is a good chance we will make it.
Automatic promotion is gone IMO, Lincoln are 10 points clear, Doncaster are 7 points clear and have 2 games in hand. I think we are fighting for the play offs.
It looks that way but Portsmouth, iirc, were clear at the top around Christmas and looking unstoppable ... .. at this rate we'll be playing them at Wembley
I'm sure Johnson is busy analysing the match and planning how to change things. As we have people who can actually play full back, and remember where they should be, I hope Power is replaced. He has good moments, when he's putting in crosses, but there are other players who should be putting in those crosses. Which also makes me wonder why Leadbitter is taking corners. In the time it takes him to amble up to take them we've lost our momentum. In all honesty his corners aren't usually worth waiting for and, surely, there are forward players, like McGeady, who can take them.
You think these refs are bad?? What about the PL ones? Getting super-slow mo, watching it 20 times over and still get it wrong!! FFS.
Yesterday once again simply wasn't a good enough result. You don't get promoted drawing against bottom half teams and we do this far far too often. Plus point is we created enough chances to win but then I worry we don't buy players who actually score goals. For their relative positions Stewart doesn't score many, Jones doesn't score many and Winchester doesn't either so it's hard to see how all of a sudden we are going to start scoring the chances we create when we don't buy players who do just that. O'Brien isn't suddenly going to start scoring either. No amount of dressing it up will take away from the fact drawing games against poor league one teams like Gillingham, MK Dons, Wimbledon, Burton and Northampton is nowhere near good enough for a club trying to get promoted. We are drawing ourselves into another season down here. Hopefully our data analysts will realise in the summer we actually need players who can score some bloody goals. Leadbitter is our second top scorer and he's managed 5 and 3 of those were penalties. For us to stand a chance we need players to start scoring, the ones that can score have been here a while now and haven't really found any consistency the past two and half seasons.
In trying to work out problems of yesterday, I reckon it was, poor finishing, goalkeeper not covering himself in glory and for large portions of the game not holding onto the ball, that is midfield being overrun. In the 2nd half towards the end we were much better... why?
I'm not totally sure, still running it through my mind. I said in the first half that we were missing Scowen's constant harassing of their midfield. It was more than that though, I was too wrapped up in it to look our for tactical changes tbh.
Agree about leadbitter, it looked as though he was time wasting every time we won a corner. Then we he finally gets around to taking it, 4 out of 5 are rubbish. Surely others can kick it better.
I picked up on Leadbitters ambling too. We were 2-1 down and there he is, trotting over to the corner looking like he was time wasting!
It's dangerous if they have a break from our corner. You'd want the centre backs fighting to get their head on it who aren't the quickest to get back and cover. Leadbitter should be left exactly where he sits as he can usually be relied on to get a tackle in. There's also the issue that, yesterday, O'Nien didn't seem to know what position he was playing. When you have someone so keen to please you have to restrict him a little. Otherwise he'll just follow the ball for 90 minutes.
Sam This. I've been saying something similar for three seasons now and don't understand the clamour that we should blow these teams away every week. Were in this **** league through years of mismanagement and to expect LJ to get this right in a couple of months is ridiculous, let the new lads get up to speed with their new team mates then we'll see how things pan out. We need to sort out a pattern of play at home which produces the same run of undefeated games that we've managed this season OaU.