Well, that sucks.
If we’re being honest, if you would have been offered a 3-2 loss at Bradford yesterday you would have probably taken it.
You would have preferred not to, but losing by that margin is much better than 3-0 or (thirteen years and five days ago, if my maths is correct) 5-1.
Yet like Luton and Cardiff, this feels a bit of a kick in the teeth. And what’s worse – it sounded like we should have got at least a point.
At Kenilworth Road, and even the game against the Bluebirds, there was this sense we were holding on a bit.
Yesterday, as we all know, we took the lead twice and still couldn’t avoid a loss.
Watching the highlights, our goals scored were good but theirs less so. I’m sure Bishop was fouled for their first, their second was a typical L1 one to concede and the third was, well….
And if Browne had got that late effort on target… mind you, if he could do that more often, he’d be in the Championship.
It’s gutting, although as somebody else pointed out, we haven’t conceded three goals in a game for a long time. I can’t be arsed to check when it was, but it’s been thankfully very rare.
It’s also rare for us to concede that third goal like we did. It happens – remember Bromley at PL last season? – but the key is not to do it too often.
To be fair, our back line is usually pretty decent, and it’s good that Stevens and Browne are getting the goals again.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so harsh on Bishop especially. Thanks to him, we beat Barnsley last week, and he’s still a young lad relatively speaking.
There’s some choice words from Huddersfield fans about Owen Goodman yesterday on t’internet, and we might not have downgraded after all.
But this is going to hurt this week, and I hope it does.
JJ himself was understandably pissed off after the game, and I fully expect he’s metaphorically kicked his dog this morning.
These kind of games are what must really send managers into apoplexy. As he said in his interview, you can cope if the opposition have done well to cut you open.
While it’s certainly no excuse, I do wonder if a bit of early season fatigue has set in.
We’ve had a fair amount of games in a month, playing at a level that we’ve had to adjust to, and against some decent opponents too.
People think that a team should be at peak levels of fitness at the start of the season, but look at how slowly some start.
Assuming we don’t get sussed out (which I’m not sure should necessarily be the case, if you read to the end), if we were to play yesterday in about October, we’d had got a point minimum.
But it’s not been a bad four weeks, especially considering what people were predicting before we’d even kicked off against Luton.
That we’ve won three games, lost three, and of the ones we were defeated we have a sense of annoyance about all of them is an encouraging start.
So far, we’ve not been outplayed in any game. At least, throughout the whole 90 minutes of one.
There have been some periods where we’ve looked second best, to put it mildly (the first 20 minutes of Barnsley spring to mind), but for this month at least we look like we belong in L1.
Dare I say we’ve looked at home in the third tier for this past four weeks as much as any time between 2016 and 2022?
In that period, we were winging it and somehow survived for three seasons before finally bowing to the inevitable.
I know you can’t really compare five (or six) previous seasons to a mere month of the current one, but I don’t have that sense of dread with this particular squad.
They’ll be seething with themselves over yesterday as much as JJ, how our previously solid defence looked as vulnerable as a Russian soldier trapped in Donetsk.
There’s a difference between losing because you’re shite and losing because you just didn’t do enough on that day to win.
We’re the latter.
SW19 does like to point out about the rest of L1, perhaps a bit too often, but this is relevant if you’re too down after Bradford.
Your editor is doing a lot of Leyton Orient home games at the moment, and it’s interesting to get an idea of how a similarly sized club is handling life in the third tier.
Yesterday, I was at Brisbane Road again and the Os were pretty useless against Northampton.
Indeed, Richie Wellens said that they weren’t a team, that they were “overthinking” and how the experienced players were more concerned about moaning to the ref.
If both them and the Cobblers can be considered ordinary L1 sides, then we certainly belong in that category.
And really, that’s all we want from this season – just to be comfortably safe as soon as possibly, to find our feet in the third tier again and not to completely fuck it up like we did the last time we were here.
There’s still eight months to go, and there will be runs of 3-4 games where we look like piles of toilet.
But if a fuck-up at Valley Parade with ten minutes to go is as bad as it gets this season, we might be all right…