Another trip way up norf tomorrow….
I suppose not being at KM tomorrow ironically gives us a better chance of beating t’Stanley. After all, our two solitary league wins and arguably our best performance (Barnsley) have come well away from KT1.
But then, we can’t keep using that as an excuse, and if playing in a rubbish small stadium is part of our mental issues, then we’ll be truly fucked in just over 24 hours time.
Accrington must be one of very few venues in the EFL that makes KM look like the new WHL. And the fact they’re in L1 shows up quite a few clubs – including, perhaps, ourselves.
Your editor was at the Chuckaturd on Tuesday, and it was the same old story against the Swansea kids. Except that we didn’t even deliver it into the box as much as we should have done.
While it’s a meaningless tournament until you reach the semi finals (although the prize money per game does come in useful), it’s somehow managed to become a jolt to the collective system.
I found the post-game comments of Neil Cox slightly interesting:
“A lot of places are up for grabs and people have to improve. That’s our job as coaches. We are working so hard on the training ground with them. We had been working on trying to get good quality into the box, but we just let it slip a bit. We just need that little bit of luck in front of goal and things will change for us.”
And on a similar note from NA’s update yesterday:
“When we work together, players and staff, we are a good team,” said Neal. “The staff do a lot of assessing and working out what we need to do in games and what we need to focus on. Last week we gave them really good information and it was the information that ended up costing us because the players did not carry it onto the pitch.
We need to work together. We give them the information and we do our homework and the players go and execute it to the letter. If we do that, then normally we are a really good team.
Hmm, two separate mentions of what the management team are doing, both presumably unprompted by the interviewer. Are they starting to feel the heat themselves?
If the reaction after Scunny and (perhaps more surprisingly) Swansea yoof is anything to go by – there’s still a bit of a hangover from last season that has never gone away.
Ultimately, the buck stops with them. And I think they know it.
While one may question how effective the work on the training ground is, I don’t doubt they’re as frustrated as any of us with the continued impotence. It might simply be a case of things just have to click.
Tomorrow would be a good time to finally – finally – start finding the net on more than one occasion. We managed it last week, it’s just that the defence forgot to play ball.
And in the case of Deji, literally.
It doesn’t help that three of the Eunuch Squad (ie our strikers) are getting mentioned in the injury updates. Tuesday would have been a good time for both Jervis and Hanson, and “Appiah” and “injury” goes together like “pepper” and “salt”.
So we might have to rely on the Pig while the other strikers are missing. All together now – no change there, then.
It’s strange that we’re heading up to Lancashire with just a bit of pressure on us. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with us, unlike last season, but we need to start proving that now.
We’re not too far away from the ten-game milestone, and already you can find one or two big faults. There’s still a l–o–n–g way to go in this season, needless to say, but patience isn’t as strong as it used to be…
Speaking of patience, the day when construction on NPL starts draws ever nearer. The pictures make that look so tantilisingly close.
After the Scunny game last week, your editor got a communication (apologies, forgot who it was) saying that the culvert carries an underground river that feeds into the Wandle and is the actual, physical border between Merton and Wandsworth.
I know what you’re thinking, and the email I got started with “Hysterically boring fact”. To be fair, it did distract from the match.
It would be a bit ultra-construction nerd to ask this question, but I wonder what state the existing drainage/pipework under the new site is? I can’t imagine it would be pristine, somehow, and just like a lot of what stood upon it, chances are it was thrown together without much thought.
Finally, and perhaps a metaphor for other things at AFCW, the blue stand is slowly coming down by hand. It did seem odd that everything else was getting flattened whereas this wasn’t.
Are these guys involved in this particular stage? At least it sounds like it properly gets demolished within a week or two now, and the October handover is on.
Just one thing about the OS update – it makes it sound like the sub-station is coming down too, and unless it’s been missed by just about everyone – it’s still going to be there.
This news puts to rest a slightly paranoid fear your editor had – namely, it was still standing because in cost-cutting measures it would be the new West Stand. All it needed was just a lick of paint and bit of duct tape from the Wickes over the road.
Job’s a goodun, and all that. Mind you, it would have cut costs and construction timelines by about 80%…