Hands up who is upset right now…?
Most of us found out about 1530 yesterday, and you get the impression that there wasn’t too much angst and blubbing going on with the announcement.
True, it seems a tad warmer here at SW19 Towers than it has been recently, though the KM pitch has been frozen since the middle of last week.
And while I don’t know how cold it’s got in Kent, if Gillingham had their covers on for two weeks and it’s still unplayable, it’s been pretty bloody cold.
The last SW19 update said that if our game today got called off it wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing. Now it is postponed, I’ll got a step further – I think it’s brilliant news.
Just as I think us not playing this weekend is as well.
If anyone needs a rest, it’s us. We just about kept going on Saturday, and it was part (though only part) of the reason why we crashed out to Sutton.
We might have done OK tonight, but more likely we might not. It would have been like Chesterfield, where we were second best too much to a team lower down.
But we’ve now got this break, and we should take it with both hands.
The OS update soon afterwards might have been happy co-incidence, but how effective would Taylor, Barcham and Parrett have been?
We’ll need Elliott back, and this layoff has come at the right time for him as well. We can get him fit and firing again before t’Blades.
Perhaps as importantly, we get a mental health break too.
For especially away from home, we’re in a psycohological rut. We saw that again in Derbyshire, almost as though we’ve forgotten where the net it.
It’s up to NA and co to figure out how to approach this downtime, but I would hope that we treat it almost like a mini pre-season campaign again.
No, I don’t mean an underwhelming friendly at a Turdeyland side, but just go through everything that we’ve done so far.
Somebody elsewhere suggested we should at least consider a couple of days in Spain as a training camp/bonding session. I can hear the rising blood pressure of our beancounters from here.
But then, if somebody comes up with the dough for it, that too wouldn’t be the worst thing for us. A change of scenery, and all that.
More likely, it’ll be some work at whatever 3G facilities are available locally, and plenty of downtime. Along with, I hope, a focus on finally doing something on the road.
Bramall Lane would be a daunting place to kickstart the season again, but wouldn’t that just be stereotypical Wimbledon** to do that?
** – I haven’t bothered checking results over recent years, but by “stereotypical” I mean playing these sort of teams and winning, often with the odds stacked against us. But is it actually true? Or do people still live in the WFC era over this sort of thing…?
Even so, any sort of reboot will be welcome. We’ve got a bonus of a break, and we should use it wisely. Even a mild upkick in form will ensure us in the third tier again next season.
No doubt we’ll have a backlog of fixtures at some point, but by then they should be academic to our survival/success. And if we’re fresher than other teams who are still playing, it could become an interesting remaining couple of months.
One final thing – I bet none of you are going to miss standing in their open stand tonight. Even if it does cost a tenner to get in…