Sorry, I already used up “Dirty Old Town” the first time we played Salford and ran out of quips…
After the highs (?) of last Tuesday, it feels every inch the comeback down to earth yesterday.
A late goal against you away from home, having one not given that looks as though it should, and losing perhaps your best centre-back properly makes it a shit weekend.
I won’t mention who the Salford manager is, some of our fans will be more interested in him than our own club.
I don’t know if it’s true what JJ says here, that we gave our best despite being under par but things going against us (I’m not bothering sitting through the whole interview) but I get the feeling there’s some truth to it.
In football, days like this happen. It just happened to be ours yesterday.
Assuming we get the go-ahead, we can all look forward to being back in SW17 again for the next week, and that’s something which will focus the mind.
But it’s going back to something the SW19 update on Friday went on about, namely the lack of goals we have right now.
I can’t be arsed to do the stats, but while we’re reasonably free scoring at home, we make eunuchs look virile away.
And in case you haven’t noticed – we haven’t had a home game in thirty years about three weeks.
At the moment, it’s not quite an issue. As mentioned a couple of days ago, all teams go through droughts and we’re in ours right now.
The way L2 operates, you can be 12th at the beginning of April yet still end up in the playoffs with a run at the right time.
If we are genuine about extending our season, and it’s not just the club trying to placate the supporters, then we’re going to need to find how to get them again.
That might require JJ himself rethinking how he approaches games on the road.
Trying to hold it tight and get the single goal may work at Cheltenham and (to an extent) Newcastle, but you can’t over-rely on it.
We certainly can’t rely on our home form, because at some point we’ll come a cropper there too.
That said, our strikers need to fulfill their side of the bargain as well. We have four recognised ones, and they’re all good enough for this level.
Is it the lack of games recently that have scuppered us? Although lest we forget, we fired blanks in Bradford as well.
The good thing is, once we do start finding the net again – and we will – we could get some pretty decent scorelines in our favour.
So maybe it’s just a case of being patient right now, doing the necessary tweaks and wait for the first goal to come off somebody’s arse again.
It’s a shame we couldn’t have done that yesterday up north, but sometimes it’s just never going to happen.
Indeed, judging by some of the post-game comments, we’d still be playing this morning and the referee will book our players for not coming off the field…