Anyone else getting a nosebleed from looking at the league table?
Anyway, welcome to 2025 and whilst typing this on Saturday morning, all seems to be OK in the AFCW world.
We’re second, although that will probably change the time you end up reading this. We seem settled for once, and we’ve even had two good wins this week.
Gillingham was one of those ones where the result mattered a helluva lot more than the performance, especially as we were spluttering a bit results wise.
Thursday evening at Newport might have been the more important one though, if only because last season and before that we would have lost.
Indeed, there was some horrible deja vu all over again, when they got a goal in the 92nd minute, and of course we would do yet another fuck up.
Except this time we didn’t.
We can be thankful that Newport’s finishing was like ours in the past couple of seasons, and it highlights just how much we’ve improved since May last year.
A quick brief aside while I think of this – I know goading former players is part and parcel of football supporting, but did Kyle Hudlin really deserve what he got after he limped off?
Yes, he was crap, but I don’t recall him slagging us off afterwards. Save it for the likes of Lemonhead at Franchise.
Anyway, this sort of result doesn’t win you promotion, but it’s one of those ones that puts you up there.
Kelly’s run and finish for our first goal was a goodun, and he’s finally starting to find his feet with us. Perhaps literally.
And as for the finish of Romaine Sawyers…
Ideally I’d like us to keep both him and Hutchinson, although it seems that our budget is too stretched for that.
Although given that they’re 33 and 35 respectively, unless Craig Cope (PBUH) has somebody even better up his sleeve, I don’t believe something can’t be done.
Both their deals expire in the next day or two, and it’s possible we’ll end up with neither. Though if I was to put a bet on it, we’ll keep our second goalscorer on Thursday…
More on transfers in a second, but the potentially difficult Xmas/NY period will be finally navigated tomorrow up at Fleetwood.
If it’s on, that is. And to be honest, a bit of me really wouldn’t be upset if it falls foul of the weather.
It feels like we’ve played the usual February grind in November and December instead, although a slight plumbing issue was responsible for a lot of that.
At times against both Gills and Newport, we looked just a little bit jaded, and I think that’s everything catching up with us.
Especially if we’ve had the likes of Ball, Bugiel and JJO’T out in that time. At least Reeves has survived another full game this week.
After tomorrow, we get quite a good run of fixtures without midweekers now, and I hope we take advantage of that.
This present month is of course the transfer window, a time of year that has destroyed many an AFCW season in recent years.
One could argue that even today, 4th January 2025, we’re still dealing with the damage done by the Ollie Palmer transfer.
Although I think the way the club was run back then, relegation would have happened sooner or later anyway.
And should we find ourselves as a L1 side next season, I would expect us to be a lot better prepared for it.
We have to get there first, and this is going to be one helluva testing time for the decision makers at this club.
This is a squad that genuinely has playoff potential and is – at the time I write this – in an automatic promotion spot.
We are potentially onto a good thing this season, which is why it will be soul-destroying to see us revert to type.
I would like to think that for once, we don’t feel the need to cash in our players.
Relying on selling anyone decent to balance the books may please the beancounters, but there’s always this sense that it’s just self-inflicted wounds.
You can go elsewhere about what we do and don’t do (and this with a backdrop of over 70% of voters selecting 50+1 when asked recently), and maybe we might be able to get a grip in due course.
Although I will state again that I think many will be surprised at just how expensive running at League Two football club really is.
This time of year has been lousy for a good while, and we’re probably still dealing with the fallout of Ollie Palmer going even now.
Our current situation should remind us that we’re a football club first and foremost. We should have ambitions, and getting back into League One is a realistic one.
Because I genuinely think with some proper professional structure behind us we could be a comfortable third-tier club.
You can’t fake the reaction after Newport, when we went second again, and you know that this squad could achieve things.
We may be fortunate that nobody stands out in the way AAH did, and that you would hope the likes of Stevens are ones to move on in the summer rather than now.
This month is going to be a major test of the club’s collective ambition, and it’s hard not to think it will lose its nerve.
That would send out an awful message to both fans and our management staff, that pushing this club upwards again will be stalled because a spreadsheet doesn’t look totally right.
That is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but given how we’ve operated in recent years you can’t blame anyone for thinking that.
We’ve got ourselves into the short-termism of needing to sell anyone who can raise a few quid, and I don’t believe we should be in that position.
We might find out what’s what this next four weeks, and I’ll be glad if we get to February with this squad intact.
Or to put it another way – sometimes, you can be too obsessed with the balance sheet…