I assume that everyone who went to Fleetwood on Saturday and reading this was getting over their hangover/dose of herpes that they got in Blackpool that weekend…
So, how to write 500+ words on a game that I haven’t seen and by the sounds of it produced little on chances? That I don’t get paid for? We, urm, didn’t win. Again. And we didn’t score. Again.
But we didn’t lose, and for that, we should be very grateful.
Actually, that makes it sound that we were hanging on for dear life, and left the North West as sore as a Ukrainian nationalist in Crimea right now. By the sound of it, apart from a nervy last five minutes, we were equal.
Which you can either look in two (kind of similar but different) ways – we’re either finally getting the momentum after our lousy February, or we’re finally getting the results after the bad luck that plagued us last month.
The latter suggests we had been playing OK enough without getting anything out of it, and there may be an element of truth to that. But at this stage of the campaign, the business end of the season if you will, points matter more than performances.
And if you doubt that, just cast your mind back to last season…
We have some immensely winnable games from now until after Mothers Day, and if we can (hopefully) have a good month then we can have a relaxing April.
Somehow, you expect we won’t, and that’s down to our continued impotence up front. I won’t bore anyone with the stats, but does anyone else get the feeling that we’ll have a massive overhaul in that department in the summer?
Our defence, bar the occasional brainfart, is completely unrecognisable from the disgrace that last season was. It is likely the reason why we’re 12th rather than 22nd.
And that was because it was put as a priority in last close season. All bar Benno and Fenlon were new imports, and they’ve overcome losing Framps to be a solid enough mid-table L2 outfit.
Case in point – we signed Tom Richards (not Edwards, as I wrote for some reason) on Friday, and by the sound of it he slotted into left back quite easily. Indeed, I have to say that until I started reading up on stuff this morning I didn’t even know he’d started.
But our goalscoring (lack thereof) is going to remain the big problem between now and the end of the season, and you have to think/hope that somebody somewhere finds the net.
The trouble is, while NA (and NC) deserves all the kudos at the back, he’s fast becoming to the forward like what TB was to our defence. At times, I’m still not sure if he fully understands that important area of the field.
Wyke and Hylton aren’t scoring much, and in the latter’s case especially I don’t think we’ll miss him if he returns up North. But weren’t they both targets? If so, you have to question NA’s judgement about recognising what a striker is.
It doesn’t help the negativity that he’s still praising Charlie Sheringham. Yes, I know Teddy’s son scored at Newport, and if we’re going to stick with him it’s better he’s scoring than not, but would he really be a L2 striker at most other clubs?
We all know about Midson, and you suspect we won’t see too many more cameos from Strutton when he recovers from his injury – and lest we forget that when he came back from Braintree we gave him game time, and we very quickly sent him back to the Conference…
So perhaps we might see a clearout up front in the summer? We are fortunate that we don’t need to massively overhaul our back line this summer, so maybe we can use a bit more in the kitty to get a better striker or two?
For now though, we have a week to try and force the impossible to happen and work even more on getting our idiots up front to put the round white thing inbetween the wooden bits with the white netting.
Somewhere in the dim and distant past, when a team called Wimbledon was playing at somebody else’s ground (er..), your editor did what you’re about to read.
It was against Preston on 29th December 2001, and given that the name of our current manager is mentioned in the report, alongside his mentor, this section is surprisingly apt a mere 13 years on.
Just ignore the bit at the beginning that says we won 2-0. Things were a lot different back then.
SW19 Coaching Manual: I know we won 2-0 today, but there are some aspects of our general play that really do need examining with immediate effect. Quite frankly, I’m fed up of explaining in words what it is, so in case any of our players are passing, please read and pass to Terry Burton. Thank you.
The inanimate object as illustrated above commonly regarded as the GOAL. It can be usually identified by having a big fishing net at its back, and can usually have another player in front of it wearing big girly gloves, often referred to as a goalkeeper. That is what Kelvin Davis’ job is.
The usually white (or if you prefer, yellow) spherical object that is carried onto the field at the end of play is called the BALL. It is often identified by a big corporate logo on its exterior, which is usually sewn in by slave child labour camps in the Philippines for a pittance, or for the same amount of money that WFC make on their Official Programme, whatever is less
Now, the basic idea of the game is to put the spherical object inbetween your opponents wooden structure as many times as possible.
There are two approaches to this, the simple approach and the Wimbledon FC approach. Please examine the two pitch plans below, and compare and contrast the flight of the ball with players in certain positions.
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As can be seen from the two illustrations above, one approach is extremely straightforward and is adopted by about 99% of teams. The other approach is laborious, supposedly “pretty”, extremely frustrating and is a major factor in not winning games.
If any passing player wishes to know the answer as to the preferred method of scoring a goal, please be aware that the incorrect answer shown above was being utilised far too often today, and meant we didn’t wrap the game up as early as what we really should have done.
Thank you. (next week on the SW19 Coaching Manual – How To Win Friends And Influence People, by C.R.Koppel)
Somehow I think the above needs to be reprinted and sent to our dressing room before York…