Hopefully a promtion party at Fleetwood, I have my ticket and I am ready to party (or par-tay as I believe the youth say these days)
As someone who was around for the last and only Championship winning side in 63/4 I can say the reasons are:- Fear of implosion. Past experience of throwing it all away. Complacency of thinking we can beat a team based on league position. Current form over 6 games = 6 points.....7 games remaining would leave us on 79 points. Because I'm a grumpygit and like the word pessimism.
Possibly one reason why the board is a bit quiet is because the last 3 games have been away, so of the members of this board there is possibly only one who has seen all 3 - or so far only one who is prepared to admit it! That in itself is devotion to duty above regular calling - probably about 1700 miles in 8 days to watch 4 goals and 3 points gained. Personally, I am a bit nervous. The number of times in the past that we've seen teams leading the way for a long time and falling away towards the end of the season must make a lot of people cautious about premature jubilation. And the way we played last night certainly didn't do a great deal for the nerves. alwaysright has, as usual, summed up the game very accurately. There were far fewer changes to the side that played on Saturday than I anticipated, but after a strong first 10 or 15 minutes for Gills Rochdale started to find their passes. I hope it was a tactical decision to concede the midfield, because that's what we did with the midfield playing far too deep most of the time, allowing Rochdale to pass the ball into the vast open spaces. Fortunately, at the moment, Rochdale don't have the quality in depth to take advantage of the space they were given, but typical of Keith Hill's previous teams they played a lot of attractive football, ON THE GROUND. If they can find a quality central core of defender, midfield and striker next season they should do a lot better. As at Morecambe Gills seemed to come to life bit more in the second half. German ran unselfishly and tirelessly and should have scored in the second half. Dack continued to show promise and seemed to have a fairly free role with regards to position, finding himself at various time on both the left and right of forward midfield. Charlie Allen came on when Dack retired with an injury, and tried to continue in the role, and whilst he enjoys an attacking midfield role he hasn't got the all round vision that Dack has. Also he needs to learn to control his tackling. After a yellow 7 minutes into his game at Morecambe he took just 4 minutes to pick up his booking last night, for a stupid and unnecessary challenge. On the Frampton sending off, and to use alwaysright's phrase, Frampton was most definitely not in the same time zone as the original incident, and was utterly stupid to get involved at all. Now, red cards are not given out for stupidity, but by running 10-15 yards to remonstrate with the 'offender' he was severely limiting the referees options when the 'offender' then decides to take a tumble. On balance, probably 1 point gained rather than 2 points lost (or not gained), but I'm still not convinced that the overall standard of play has been significantly better than that either Morecambe or Rochdale. It certainly wasn't as attractive, overall. But we still have a solid defence, and when (I use that word cautiously) we start the first of hopefully 2 celebrations (automatic and the championship), it will be the defence that will have brought us the results we need since the beginning of the year, not the forwards. So for that reason I can see a few more draws coming before the end of the season, and just hope we aren't undone by more defensive errors.
