Bit like our team today at Bury…
Yep, after about three weeks this site will start kicking back into life. And in truth so has the team on the field.
I only listened to WDON today, simply because getting to Bury was nigh on impossible (oh for a home tie…), but at least our culture of failure in cup competitions has been delayed for now.
Yes, we could do without the replay, but I’d much rather that than yet another weekend of bitching about yet another trophy where we fall at the first hurdle.
And at 1545 GMT today, that’s exactly what was going to happen.
Obviously you can’t fully gather what’s going on by radio commentary, and you’d be an idiot if you pretended otherwise, but it didn’t seem that we turned up in the first half today.
Plenty of brickbats are getting lobbed at Barnett right now, and it’s happening more and more by a greater percentage of people.
It doesn’t help him when he gets subbed and we suddenly score twice. OK, by “suddenly” I mean six minutes apart, but it’s obvious that our most effective striker ATM is Tom Elliott.
Well, it’s actually Poleon but he seems MIA right now. I assume he’s still injured. Or doing too well when he does play.
Those there can write their own match reports, but for the rest of us, we’re thankfully in the proverbial hat for Monday’s second round draw.
As long as it’s not THEM (watch us get drawn at home to Franchise now), then it should give us plenty of incentive to earn a potential route to the third round.
Having a replay but watching the draw is always a bit strange – you’re in it, but you’re not fully part of it at that stage.
Not that it won’t stop people looking beyond the replay. We all do it. For example, if you’ve been thinking about a fellow L1 side, then it becomes practically another league fixture.
A L2 team is in theory more winnable, though there’s always the possibility of an upset. Ditto a Conference National side, where the carrot always outweighs the actual fixture.
What would shit me up is potentially against a side lower than that. A Westfields or Stourbridge is only ever a banana skin, especially at KM, and the likelyhood of fucking that up is higher than it should be.
All that will be irrelevant if we can’t dispose of Bury in the replay, needless to say. They went 2-0 up for a reason, though us equalising happened for that very same line of logic.
Can we win the replay? Of course. Will we do so? I’d like to think we can – Bury might feel right now as though they blew what should have been a cert at half time.
As we’ve proven too many times in recent years, once you don’t take your chances then it often bites you on the arse. But when you do…
Speaking of the Shakers, after the 19th we’ll be so sick of them we’ll be destroying black puddings out of irrationality.
It’s sod’s law that we’ve played them last month, faced them today, get to host them Tuesday week and finally welcome them back to KM the following Saturday.
Remember Everton in about 1993? Or Spurz in those six million games, whenever it was? I guess “can we play you every week” was a bit too ironic to sing by then.
Questions about our creaking squad might start surfacing, and having to play a semi-full strength side at Newport on Tuesday doesn’t help matters.
With the ex-JPT fixture, I think doing the old sub-three-players-after-a-minute trick would be justifiable in this particular circumstance.
We’re through anyway, it’s so much a dead rubber that it’s only a fiver to get in, and this would be a glorified friendly without the fun of pre-season.
If we do that and go down to ten men after about six minutes, so be it. Fuck it, make it nine players and make the game more entertaining than it should be.
I’m semi-serious, BTW. The money helps from this tournament, but if it becomes farcical it would only match the tournament this season anyway.
Any player we don’t need to take with us, we shouldn’t do. Instead of Shea, put in McDonnell instead. We don’t need Barry Fuller, or Taylor, or Elliott to start, so leave them at home on Tuesday.
This is a good time to give more game time to Whelpdale and Robertson, and the youngsters could do with a runout as well. The more the merrier.
Hell, we can even start Barnett…