That was a waste of time, money and effort.
There was something depressingly predictable about Field Mill 2 Feel Ill 1, but also excrutiatingly annoying too. Granted, it’s yet another fuckup against a struggling side, and that particular issue has gone way beyond funny.
But you can handle playing badly, yet getting a point out of it. Which is what we should have done last night.
Not one, but possibly three. We got a lifeline with the penalty, and then threw it away in a way that is still pissing me off this sunny morning.
It’s not just their second goal. Azeez showed why many reckon he’ll be a Conference player in the next couple of seasons. True, he got into goalscoring positions, but any semi-decent striker would hit the target at least once.
One of his efforts has just arrived in Derby.
I’ve only seen their first goal on SSN, which didn’t look quite as bad as it did in the flesh. And to be fair to their player he did connect well to it.
Their second though, well…. Winfield is getting the brickbats over it, but from memory we didn’t exactly clear it when we could have anyway.
Whatever it was, that was the second defeat in a row, the second in four days and if we’re being honest this could end up being a horrible March.
I don’t fancy our “defending” against Pompey on Saturday, especially as Tubbs feels he has a point to prove against us. And then we travel up to Merseyside for yet another likely humiliation against a struggling side.
Forget last month being the one from hell, this one could be the un-heralded sequel.
We weren’t totally shit last night, but too often we were just brainless. When we missed yet another one-on-one, it was almost as though the players knew they were going to get sodomised right at the end.
I just hope we’re not going to get what we had far too much of last season, namely players giving it the old “we’re going to get a reaction for the fans” and then going on to lose the next game.
This campaign has been refreshingly free of that bullshit, probably because the OS isn’t interviewing Sammy Moore, but we are in poor form right now and it may get worse before it gets better.
We can forget the playoffs now, unless you’re the AFCW equivalent of that Japanese soldier who was still fighting WW2. It would end up being majorly deflating if we were to decline to 16th or even lower now, because that really would feel like underachievement this season.
And if I had to endure it last night, you can endure reading the following today…
Plus points: Finding somebody else instead of Akinfenwa to take penalties.
Minus points: We lost. Threw it away. Couldn’t finish to save our lives. Fucking up in defence. Kennedy getting injured. Too much panicking. The M25 closing between junctions 17 and 16 and adding a half-hour to my journey. All round why-am-I-here feeling.
The referee’s a…: He must have been good as it’s taking me a couple of minutes to think of anything he did wrong, and coming up with nothing.
Them: To be fair to them, I didn’t realise they were on decent enough form beforehand (their last seven games before our game were : DWLWWDL), so maybe there was an all-round complacency on our part?
They were certainly “tough”, though not as dirty as some of our fans like to make out. That said, they were most likely to win if we gifted it to them, which needless to say…
Field Mil…. er, the One Call Stadium isn’t too bad a stadium, they obviously speculated to accumilate over it and were rewarded by being dispersed to the Conference. Odd they built it without any executive boxes though.
Oh, and I wouldn’t suggest they’re many years behind the times in deepest Nottinghamshire, but they had an ad hoarding for ITV Sport Channel facing the away end…
Point to ponder: Perhaps the biggest player loss this season wasn’t Tubbs, or Barrett, or even Benno and/or Framps – but Connolly?
Last night wouldn’t have been bad as a cameo for him, as he would have done a helluva lot better than Azeez in those positions. If you add him and Tubbs, that’s two strikers we’ve failed to adequately replace since the turn of the year.
And make no mistake – our goalscoring is a real problem now.
The stats don’t lie. Since February started (ten games ago), we’ve failed to score in five of them. Of those we have found the net in, Akinfenwa has three of them – two against Newport.
Such is my mood this morning, I took the liberty of going through the goalscorers list for these games, and it’s quite startling. And more than a tad concerning.
Including last night, the rest of the scorers are : Deji, Smith, Potter, Bulman, Connolly and Francomb. Only one of those is a proper striker, and he’s retired.
For our other two forwards, that is a piss-poor return.
Azeez has at least scored earlier in the campaign, and did at least get into positions last night to score. Apparently, this was one of Tanner’s best games for us, so I don’t want to see him play badly.
We’ve done OK with loan signings as strikers in recent years – Tubbs is the obvious one, though Smith and Wyke were useful enough. This time, we haven’t.
Tanner is managing to be worse than Hylton, and I cannot see why we’re lumbered with him.
Yes, he may well need a goal. Thing is, if he does get one, it will probably be a scabby one where three opposition defenders manage to all miskick it at the same time.
There was nothing about him last night that makes me think he’ll make it. It’s all very well for Reading to offer him a new deal, and wax lyrical about him, but if he was to return to the Madejski tomorrow I doubt if we’d miss him.
Which does beg a further question – what do we do for the rest of the season? After last night, I wouldn’t be against bringing in another youngster on loan up front, because we need another option and we just don’t have one.
We’ll get by from now until May, because we’re not going down and we’re certainly not going up. And you can finish that chant yourself.
But it’s going to be a harder slog than it needs to be, and Akinfenwa can’t do it on his own. Although a lot of the time, he has to…
Truth is stranger than fiction: 1) Special offer at the tea bar – 50p chicken soup. The first and only time I can ever remember a concession stand offering something that is reduced. For the record, it tasted of something but it certainly wasn’t chicken. 2) You know the portable goals they have before games to protect the goalmouth? The one down our end got tangled up. No WUM..
Basically, our subs were playing the crossbar challenge (I hope – it certainly wasn’t getting it in the back of the net) and hit one of the carriers to make them drop it. It really was as good as it got…
Anything else? Not really. There’s a big PC World/Currys near the ground, which had a £19 little DAB radio – worth trying it through your AUX jack in your car, perhaps.
No, that’s not particularly relevant or entertaining to read. But it’s better than talking about the game.
So, was it worth it? Fuck off.
In a nutshell: £20 for this?