Another day in an odd week, another update…
I was going to leave touching SW19 until after Newport (you’re all getting on well in the last comments section), but the inevitable rally cry on the OS last night caught my attention.
Firstly, I think NA pretty much had to remind the players what is what at AFCW. The fact that St. Evenage even today on Friday 18th December is still a bone of contention shows that.
The trouble is, reading it, I get a distinct feeling of deja vu all over again…
OK, if you were to search back on the OS you’re not going to find quotes like “we talked about what this club represents” after previous shitfests, but I seriously doubt if we didn’t had similar post-mortems at other points of this season.
The reaction after Morecambe and Crawley at half time are two obvious candidates, and they’re just the ones we can make educated guesses about.
But whether they actually happened or they didn’t – they’re plausible, as they say on Mythbusters. Obviously, this latest round of soul-searching has touched more of a nerve than usual, and NA and co have had no choice but to respond.
The following comments jumped out at me, though:
For me, the most important thing is that three games ago people were talking to me about being on an unbeaten run and now they are saying we haven’t won in six.
“You can spin it whatever way you want to spin it, but we are just five points off the play-offs. All the way through the season, including when things were going well, I was saying that you know a sticky spell is just around the corner in this league. Chesterfield won the league a couple of seasons ago and they lost six out of seven games.
Hmm.
A couple of things. Firstly, call me old fashioned but surely the most important thing is not to go six games without a win to begin with?
It’s also worth remembering that before we beat t’Stanley, we’d only won twice in the previous league eight games. OK, we drew as many as we lost, but it’s still not the form of a legitmate play-off team.
As for Chesterfield, yes they did go seven games without a win. The trouble is, they had won seven out of the previous eight, and didn’t do too much wrong since their blip.
Or to put it another way – the Spirites were genuine title contenders with a strong squad and winning ethos. We, well, aren’t…
I know NA is trying to put on an act of bravado here, and after the week he’s had I wouldn’t blame him for doing so. But he needs to be a bit more careful before he puts out the “spin” comment, because there are more people willing to pick holes in what he says now.
And writing that has given me a thought – maybe NA tells the players similar things, one or two of them check up on it further and find it’s not entirely accurate?
A successful manager has to be believable in what he says, because otherwise the players just see through it. And if we’re being honest here – it would explain a lot at AFCW right now…
I haven’t watched the video but apparently NA looks worn out on it. I believe he had a nasty cold which might have fatigued him even more than usual.
He needs a win tomorrow, as do we, even if it’s only for a bit of temporary respite. It will make Xmas a bit nicer, certainly, although I think we may now be at the stage where we’re just going to enjoy games week to week.
Because one of the factors of this week’s clusterfuck has been many re-evaluating the long term direction of this club. Is the “gradual improvement” approach good enough now?
Come to think of it, can you even call it an improvement? Let alone a gradual one?
We’ll find out over the coming weeks and months, although deep down I expect most of us know what the answer will be. We can make at least partial amends in South Wales tomorrow.
At least, if the sodding game goes ahead. It’s rain all day, basically, and it wouldn’t be the first time Newport gets called off for the wet stuff.
I’m not sure if it will do us any good, because it just means that we’ll have to wait until Boxing Day to get St. Evenage out of our system.
And by then, we’ll be near to the January transfer window…