I wish we did have a couple more internationals, so we could have called yesterday off.
Anyway, if I was to suggest one word to describe Notlob 3 Tihsesroh 0, it would be…… challenging.
The whole day seemed one big challenge, from the first kick to the last, and it wasn’t even exactly plain sailing for your editor beforehand.
Long story short – there were no tickets on the day. I found this out when I got up there and parked outside.
Cue panic.
Eventually, after trying (and failing) to get into the press area, I somehow managed to pull a string to get into the away entrance, as clearly the helpful BWFC official went a bit pale when I suggested I was going to go into the home end…
I’m going to spend the next twelve paragraphs giving AFCW comms some constructive criticism here – and yes, it is constructive.
Some years ago, a press bod at a Championship/L1 type club told me you have to be explicit on every restriction on buying an away ticket if there is one – and update people at least daily.
The reason why is that most people have jobs, and/or families, and/or other commitments through the week meaning they easily miss it.
When the last ticket update for the game on Twatter via AFCW was published Friday it missed out a VERY important bit of information.
And a bit that would have taken about five seconds maximum to write, or about a minute to put up and re-publish on the official site.
Many people just glance at the OS, or various social media, and it was very easy to assume tickets would be available on the day.
After all, the club didn’t say you couldn’t.
The OS update did say that, but it was shunted way down the page when I checked on Friday afternoon, below park benches and the women’s upcoming match.
Granted, if I had seen it I would have obviously kicked myself for missing out, and that would have been my fault.
And yes, I know I should read the OS more often, and now it’s likely I’ll be at more away games this season I will have more expert knowledge.
But it seems just so un-necessary when it doesn’t need to be.
The club is getting better at comms, but it still struggles with basic information at times – and the point of comms is that the consumer/punter shouldn’t need to guess what it is.
I got lucky (?) yesterday, but I bet I wasn’t the only one in the same situation.
Anyway, I’ve subjected you all that because it’s twelve paragraphs that I don’t have to write about the game.
Stevens hit the post early on, and it got steadily worse from then on.
That I think their first goal was offside doesn’t matter, because they would have scored eventually.
But put it this way – I thought the game had been going a long time, looked at the stadium clock and saw it was only 21 minutes in.
I’ll quickly move on to the second half, because we started a bit brighter. But then Marcus Browne had other ideas.
Can you remember the last time a dismissed player was literally shoved off the pitch by his captain? It was a fucking awful challenge, and we miss him for three games now.
Maybe that’s why Browne found himself training with the PFA last year?
They scored, then they scored again, and leaving early felt like a very good option. To be fair, I held on until about 89 minutes, before leaving to beat the traffic became a legitimate excuse.
I did manage to see us seal a day of whale wank with Joe Lewis getting his second yellow. Personally, I thought Forss milked it a lot, but it summed yesterday up.
This wasn’t so much a bad day at the office, but coming in Monday to find out your firm has been bought out and you’ve lost your job, your salary and your pension.
You trudge back home but find your car has broken down. So you have to get public transport, except it’s on strike.
And you walk home. It’s a long journey and it’s raining. You finally get home, and you find the CEO of the firm who has just sacked you shagging your missus up the arse with her loving it.
Something like that, anyway.
Plus points: At least there wasn’t much traffic from Bolton to Morden afterwards. Getting a free cup of tea at half time because their tills fucked up.
Minus points: Everything else.
The referee’s a…: It doesn’t help the collective mood when the referee effectively guesses decisions, usually against you, and you realise it’s Darren Drysdale.
Seriously, has he been promoted to L1? I’d forgotten his avant-garde approach to officialdom, coupled with the smug arrogance of an RAF sergeant.
I really wished Alan Judge had nutted him in 2021. It would have been well worth the lifetime ban.
Them: They had that belief that they were going to win beforehand yesterday, and so it proved.
They just seemed fitter, sharper, had the run of the green (in more ways than one) and was kind-of how we expected all games in L1 to be like.
Notlob are a Championship level club who are in the third tier because they are/were poorly run behind the scenes, and you won’t be surprised to see them go up eventually.
They have something like 19000 season ticket holders, and the attendance yesterday was officially about 21k.
It wasn’t a particularly good atmosphere though, in fact at times when it was 3-0 you could genuinely hear the players talk to each other.
I haven’t been to the Reebok Macron Toughsheet Community Stadium since about 2002 at the very latest, and for out-of-town stadia it’s not as bad as Derby or Reading.
There’s a lot more round it these days, I remember when it was the stadium and nothing else bar Horwich Parkway.
Considering it was built in the early 1990s it still seems in good nick. And I prefer it to their old gaff.
Though if it wants to recreate the Burnden Park experience, they should have put the nearby Tesco in the middle of the away end.
Point to ponder: Just what the fuck has happened to our defence?
It was the main reason we’re in L1 to begin with, it showed signs of continuing where it left off, and then this.
Yes, teams are a bit better in this division, but that still doesn’t excuse what’s happened recently.
We were missing Johnson yesterday, although I don’t think he’s the reason why we got gubbed.
Lewis has been injured recently, and perhaps he came back a bit too soon? At least he’s got a game off next week.
Perhaps that’s why we signed Bauer?
I’ll leave the stuff about full backs to those who find tactics interesting (I don’t, I genuinely find them one of the most boring parts of football watching), but there seems to be something up there too.
Our L1 status won’t be decided by losing at Bolton or Luton, or against Cardiff, but whatever it was we were doing – we need to get back to it PDQ.
Truth is stranger than fiction: 1) The Smiths on the PA and then Paranoid by Sabbath as the teams came out for the second half. Though it should have been “Fairies Wear Boots”. 2) £3.40 for a cup of tea. Only purchased out of mental exhaustion, and I still hate myself. Even if I got a free one.
Anything else? I’m glad we haven’t got a game this midweek, because I think we need it.
We’ve lost two L1 games on the spin, one where we were unfortunate and one where we definitely weren’t.
But we’ve also lost to Reading in the Carabao, and were horrible against St. Evenage in the ex-JPT.
We need a reset, to get back to basics on the training ground. And we’ve got a week where we can do exactly that.
It’s tempting to write off the Reading/St. Evenage fixtures as ones with major changes, and you can over-analyse them.
But it has meant we’ve lost 4 in a row, effectively, and that’s something which needs addressing PDQ.
I’ve mentioned the defence above, and I don’t doubt there’ll be a lot of hard work at New Malden this week.
It’s been a better first seven games that we expected, although one notes that our victories haven’t been against the most fancied sides.
Fortunately, that may not matter. For every Bolton in L1, there’s a Lincoln. Especially at Plough Lane, where we’ll have to make sure it doesn’t become Theme Park PL
I used to call KM that because at times, it was the place where all visitors went home happy.
It’s still very early in the season, history has proved that we do seem to tail off around September anyway for some reason.
And as said previously, I don’t think our issues are insurmountable one bit.
Yesterday was unusual insofar as it was the first time in a good while where we’ve been genuinely awful.
Maybe Port Vale at PL towards the back end of last season was the last poor game we were in, although I think that was pre-playoff fatigue.
We shouldn’t make a habit of it, but it’s been a good while since a genuine stinker like yesterday – and that’s a good thing.
So, was it worth it? As much fun as being kicked repeatedly in the gonads.
In a nutshell: No comment.