St Albans 2-1 Enfield Town

[Father Jack]

I have deleted several posts from this thread, as it was in danger of getting out of hand. Reasoned discussion is acceptable, abuse, obscenities and name-calling, however, are not. Please play nicely, or the whole thread will be removed.

[Towningaround]

No idea why you deleted my post responding articulately to post which referred to me as a ****

It didn’t contain any abuse or insults other than to quote / refer to what I was called. 

Other than that it was pretty constructive. Maybe it was too near the truth and we’d all be far more comfortable if we just went merrily about our way to finishing bottom of the league without even a fight. 

[Barney]

Going back to the game briefly, I don't think we played terribly... we were sloppy defensively for their first goal, and you definitely don't want to be going a goal down on a heavy pitch in a game like that, as it just affords the opposition the ability to slow things down, and hit us on the counter. Although they had chances in the first half to double their lead, I actually think we were the better side, with some decent moves where we worked space and got behind them and put in some really dangerous balls. Some of them we didn't have bodies in the box, other times we did, but seemed to mishit or somehow fluff our lines. Tuck's chance sums this up for me, he really should be at least hitting the target there, and had one of those chances been converted, I think the game would have panned out very differently. Whether we'd have converted the chances with a second striker, or whether we'd have had as much of the ball to create the chances without the extra midfielder is moot frankly... Gavin has decided he wants to play with 1 forward and Youngs just behind, and I thought Youngs had a good game all in, and we didn't do too badly overall (Peake once again looked threatening most times he got the ball in space). Second half was a bit more of the same, although we tired (from chasing the game for 70 minutes), and when they scored a second, it felt like it had been coming, but we could and probably should have got something out of it on balance had we been more clinical.

All that said, it's clear to me that we were watching two sides at the wrong end of the table, and I don't see either surviving based on that showing, and their league positions / gap to safety. I really hope we don't go out with just a whimper, and we do put together some kind of run to at least keep the season alive until March/April, but that really does need to start soon.

Shout out to the facilities at St Albans too, a nice characterful ground, and it was good to see multiple bars run by a local brewery, which seemed to be well used - just a shame I was on driving duty yesterday 🤦‍♂️

[Father Jack]

1 hour ago, Towningaround said:

No idea why you deleted my post responding articulately to post which referred to me as a ****

It didn’t contain any abuse or insults other than to quote / refer to what I was called. 

Other than that it was pretty constructive. Maybe it was too near the truth and we’d all be far more comfortable if we just went merrily about our way to finishing bottom of the league without even a fight. 

Unfortunately I decided to delete every post that quoted that term of abuse, although I didn't really want to, as some of them were really constructive. Please don't stop posting, as I like your posts - we need sensible debate on here, and forceful argument is good!

 

Regards, FJ

[No bull Towner]

8 minutes ago, Father Jack said:

Unfortunately I decided to delete every post that quoted that term of abuse, although I didn't really want to, as some of them were really constructive. Please don't stop posting, as I like your posts - we need sensible debate on here, and forceful argument is good!

 

Regards, FJ

Calling someone a 'clot' is not abusive in the way that was implied when he inserted an 'n'.....was it left open to interpretation? Probably!
If you google silly clot for example you will see it means stupid person. Anyway nice to know you favour his contributions 🤣

[Towningaround]

You honestly felt the need to asterisk out the word “clot” ?

Im pretty certain no one favours any persons post, probably just favours  any post that contains constructive and / or articulate debate. 

Im here to debate football. If much of that goes over your head that can’t be helped. 

I believe the schools go back Monday so that may make life easier for both of us. 
 

[No bull Towner]

1 minute ago, Towningaround said:

You honestly felt the need to asterisk out the word “clot” ?

Im pretty certain no one favours any persons post, probably just favours  any post that contains constructive and / or articulate debate. 

Im here to debate football. If much of that goes over your head that can’t be helped. 

I believe the schools go back Monday so that may make life easier for both of us. 
 

You see at my age, even clot is a bit rude,as I am old school but I knew inserting asterisks could also allow an alternative assumption and you obviously favoured the fit of that hat. See, again you are trying to belittle me as if you are the only one who knows anything. Don't know why you think I'm so young either. I have much more knowledge than you think....but no, I'm still not Gav!

[djwilf]

Don't think this season has or will be decided in any one game.    We are playing in a much tougher league and this is a million miles away from PBT, Wingate and the A10 Classico....with all due respect to those clubs.

I've watched the likes of Torquay and BW's warm ups recently and kept a little eye on ours.   When doing their shooting drills those opposing sides are absolutely clinical.    I believe one of Torquay's players was on loan from Plymouth, a far cry from who we have been trying to recruit.

I commented I think 2 months back that we had used nearly 50 players.    That number will now be closer to 60.    Yes the side has been more settled recently however if you look at where our goals have come from this year very few have come from midfield.   Again, not to critique our effort here as don't think any players can be criticised for effort this year but as said above we are trying to punch well above our weight.   

Would things be slightly different if we had 2 up front?   Possibly, but still don't think it would have a major impact on our position in the league.   would things be different if we still had Marcus?   Possibly but again one player wouldn't get us out of this mess.    We've scored less goals than games played and in addition are allowing on avg more than 2 goals a game.    You cannot look past Rhys for player of the season which is a complete contrast to our attacking last season.

Our recruitment is the MAIN reason for our situation.    Fan owned club, the fact that other teams are operating as a professional outfit and you can talk about formations, positions of players and so on and our situation still probably would be no different.    I'm not sure what we'll learn from this season apart from the fact that we (and I mean the club) did not do a good enough job of recruitment during June, July and August and this is where we are now.

 

Agree FJ, I do enjoy coming on here but isn't positive for anyone if we can't be civil to each other.      Hopefully the discussion can continue with reasonable positivity.

The league wasn't lost on New Year's Day, it happened long long before then.

 

Happy New Year all

[Towningaround]

10 minutes ago, No bull Towner said:

Don't know why you think I'm so young either

The childish nature of your responses. Simple as that really. 

11 minutes ago, No bull Towner said:

I have much more knowledge than you think

Then use it to debate football sensibly.

18 minutes ago, No bull Towner said:

See, again you are trying to belittle me as if you are the only one who knows anything

Do you have complete amnesia on how this debate went? I didnt make any reference to you or your posts until you called me a pretentious “clot”. 

[No bull Towner]

7 minutes ago, djwilf said:

Don't think this season has or will be decided in any one game.    We are playing in a much tougher league and this is a million miles away from PBT, Wingate and the A10 Classico....with all due respect to those clubs.

I've watched the likes of Torquay and BW's warm ups recently and kept a little eye on ours.   When doing their shooting drills those opposing sides are absolutely clinical.    I believe one of Torquay's players was on loan from Plymouth, a far cry from who we have been trying to recruit.

I commented I think 2 months back that we had used nearly 50 players.    That number will now be closer to 60.    Yes the side has been more settled recently however if you look at where our goals have come from this year very few have come from midfield.   Again, not to critique our effort here as don't think any players can be criticised for effort this year but as said above we are trying to punch well above our weight.   

Would things be slightly different if we had 2 up front?   Possibly, but still don't think it would have a major impact on our position in the league.   would things be different if we still had Marcus?   Possibly but again one player wouldn't get us out of this mess.    We've scored less goals than games played and in addition are allowing on avg more than 2 goals a game.    You cannot look past Rhys for player of the season which is a complete contrast to our attacking last season.

Our recruitment is the MAIN reason for our situation.    Fan owned club, the fact that other teams are operating as a professional outfit and you can talk about formations, positions of players and so on and our situation still probably would be no different.    I'm not sure what we'll learn from this season apart from the fact that we (and I mean the club) did not do a good enough job of recruitment during June, July and August and this is where we are now.

 

Agree FJ, I do enjoy coming on here but isn't positive for anyone if we can't be civil to each other.      Hopefully the discussion can continue with reasonable positivity.

The league wasn't lost on New Year's Day, it happened long long before then.

 

Happy New Year all

Agree with you completely

[No bull Towner]

Just now, Towningaround said:

The childish nature of your responses. Simple as that really. 

Then use it to debate football sensibly.

Do you have complete amnesia on how this debate went? I didnt make any reference to you or your posts until you called me a pretentious “clot”. 

So saying that you would talk very slowly so that I could understand something simple isn't belittling as if I'm special needs?? No?? Just don't respond to me and I won't you, problem solved. I don't value your persistent negativity any more than you value my opinions. End of discussion, I won't respond to you again!

[Towningaround]

10 minutes ago, No bull Towner said:

So saying that you would talk very slowly so that I could understand something simple isn't belittling as if I'm special needs?? No?? Just don't respond to me and I won't you, problem solved. I don't value your persistent negativity any more than you value my opinions. End of discussion, I won't respond to you again!

Which began with “sometimes you make me laugh….” and finished with “I know let’s just play 2 at the back” in a condescending manner which made it clear you had no understanding of my point at all. So I explained.

Its just dawned on me that you’re female. Apologies for being so rude 👍

[ETFC2001]

36 minutes ago, djwilf said:

Don't think this season has or will be decided in any one game.    We are playing in a much tougher league and this is a million miles away from PBT, Wingate and the A10 Classico....with all due respect to those clubs.

I've watched the likes of Torquay and BW's warm ups recently and kept a little eye on ours.   When doing their shooting drills those opposing sides are absolutely clinical.    I believe one of Torquay's players was on loan from Plymouth, a far cry from who we have been trying to recruit.

I commented I think 2 months back that we had used nearly 50 players.    That number will now be closer to 60.    Yes the side has been more settled recently however if you look at where our goals have come from this year very few have come from midfield.   Again, not to critique our effort here as don't think any players can be criticised for effort this year but as said above we are trying to punch well above our weight.   

Would things be slightly different if we had 2 up front?   Possibly, but still don't think it would have a major impact on our position in the league.   would things be different if we still had Marcus?   Possibly but again one player wouldn't get us out of this mess.    We've scored less goals than games played and in addition are allowing on avg more than 2 goals a game.    You cannot look past Rhys for player of the season which is a complete contrast to our attacking last season.

Our recruitment is the MAIN reason for our situation.    Fan owned club, the fact that other teams are operating as a professional outfit and you can talk about formations, positions of players and so on and our situation still probably would be no different.    I'm not sure what we'll learn from this season apart from the fact that we (and I mean the club) did not do a good enough job of recruitment during June, July and August and this is where we are now.

 

Agree FJ, I do enjoy coming on here but isn't positive for anyone if we can't be civil to each other.      Hopefully the discussion can continue with reasonable positivity.

The league wasn't lost on New Year's Day, it happened long long before then.

 

Happy New Year all

Well said. I said something similar on this thread yesterday.

There’s not a singular issue we can fix that would help us start dominating teams or picking points up consistently. We have so many issues top to bottom and there isn’t fixes for some of the issues YET.

We need more time as a club to further build the foundations for extra revenue and budget. Maybe we can be a bit more ambitious then.

I’ve kept optimistic about this season, but I think we’ve really just been fooling ourselves on how far behind we are to stay up in a league like this. It’s night and day from some of these teams we’ve played in this league.

Focus on recruiting a good team for step 3 next season, and let’s hope we are winning a couple more games then we have this season🤣. 

Edited Thursday at 12:34 by ETFC2001

[No bull Towner]

17 minutes ago, Towningaround said:

Which began with “sometimes you make me laugh….” and finished with “I know let’s just play 2 at the back” in a condescending manner which made it clear you had no understanding of my point at all. So I explained.

Its just dawned on me that you’re female. Apologies for being so rude 👍

Wrong 

Edited Thursday at 12:42 by No bull Towner
Error

[Towningaround]

Apologies. It was the only mitigating circumstance I could find.

[The Crowing Cockerel]

Glad to see everyone's been having fun on here following yesterday's inevitable catastrophe! Our season won't be defined by yet another defeat. Things were set in stone within the first 10 games.

It was the club's twitter admin who reminded me of the 13/14 season where we avoided relegation from Step 3 by the skin of our teeth: https://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/isthmian-football-league-premier-division/league-table/2013-2014 - what interested me about that season was the way in which the Board handled things. Steve Newing, the saviour who had taken us into the exalted land of Step 3, struggled. We were heading back down. Mid-November 2013 - the team having not won a game since August, the Board acted decisively and decided to make a change. In came George Borg (- Scott McLeish being amongst the applicants for the job). Slowly but surely things were turned around and some of us will remember the final day survival mission down at Bromley. My point really is this: the Board changed the manager that season in order to change our fortunes. This season we are in an even more dire position - as in 2013, in a league in which we are certainly not established. And yet, the manager is safe in his role. Presumably this must mean that the Board do not think that either (1) we can recruit anyone better; or (2) anyone else could do any better. To me it looks very much as if the Board are quite content to see the club back down at Step 3. After all, a new manager couldn't do any worse! Its incredibly disappointing, but then I don't know anything about the financial realities of survival at Step 2. It probably says something about our expectations that in our 24 years we have only finished in the bottom half of whichever league we've been in on 5 previous occasions - and this, of course, would be our first relegation.

Back to the football...

I'm not quite sure what the question is, but whatever it is I'm fairly confident that Anointed Chukwu is not the answer. He struggled to hold the ball up against the mandatory powerful Step 2 centre-halves, and then fluffed his lines on the couple of occasions when he did get a chance. On top of that, the whole team seemed incredibly shot-shy. Peake failed to test Johnson from the edge of the box having done all the hard work, and the least said about Tuck's miss from 12yds the better. Other than the goal, I can't think of a single effort the St Albans keeper had to save. Whilst the defence has improved, the midfield and forward line are still not yet good enough for Step 2. Alfie Tuck is not particularly suited to Step 2 at this stage in his career. He is technically very good, but physically at 18 struggles to compete with bigger/stronger opponents at this level. This season won't do him any harm, and in a couple of years he will more than hold his own, but he isn't the midfield maestro we desperately need. Credit too to Mickey for stepping into the middle of the park and giving his all. He has certainly been better than Scott Thomas, but again, he's not the answer. Bayley Brown has been an improvement on previous players, but I agree that he is not an attacking midfielder.

In the not too distant future I suspect we will be 15+ points off safety. Barring an injury to Sam Youngs, it seems to me that Gavin won't change his 'lone striker system'. So I guess its going to be a tough few months spectating at The Dave Bryant!

Edited Thursday at 14:37 by The Crowing Cockerel

[ETFC2001]

1 hour ago, The Crowing Cockerel said:

Presumably this must mean that the Board do not think that either (1) we can recruit anyone better; or (2) anyone else could do any better.

Am I right to probably assume this is the case?

I’m not saying Gavin is a world class manager for this level, but there isn’t any one out there that I know of. Of course people have suggested Brad, but there’s not a singular evidence of him even wanting to come back.

Then we of course have to pay this manager, which is going to be a nightmare in itself. I always knew Gavin wasn’t going to get sacked this season no matter how it went, unless he walked himself. And he isn’t going to walk, because he still thinks he is the right man for the job. Maybe delusional as such, you make that decision.

But I also don’t think any manager could get us out of this hole at the moment. The players are too few and far inbetween that even if this new manager had contacts, they would probably ask for more money we was willing to give, and I don’t think we have that great of a squad outside of a few.

I see how you bring up the 13-14 relegation survival but I think football has changed a lot since then. While that was a great last day, players have gotten better, managers etc I think have expanded their tactical know hows and we’re seeing that. I understand there is a new manager bounce sort of thing, but I don’t know how long that would last in a league like this, especially with how we’re up against it.

So the bigger picture is this; We aren’t in a stable enough position to stay up with the resources we have at the moment. I believe there is work to do off the football pitch before we even reach the highs of really fitting in with the National League system. I understand there’s clubs like Hornchurch, who don’t have the prettiest facilities, but they have enough money to comfortably do what they want. And we lack both at the moment. I understand being fan owned, we aren’t exactly going to start rising in wealth anytime soon, but there is certainly more things we can do to raise revenue and help give us more income. I hope crowds just don’t take a massive hit either if we do go back down.

It’s not going to be all roses in the Isthmian either though. There’s definitely going to be definitely some tough weeks and I hope we recruit and rebuild well for next season. 

[djwilf]

Cannot remember a game we ve really won the midfield this year and so much talk about strikers.   We havent been good enough this year for all the reasons stated and doubt our formation has a great deal to with it.    Opponents have bossed us, defenders not given us a sniff and we ll never know how many of our squad have been good enough.     It doesnt seem to be many.   If we had 3 or 4 of Adams quality then things may have been different.    This treadmill has been going much faster than we could have managed and I think the learning curve much steeper than most of us expected.

[The Crowing Cockerel]

37 minutes ago, djwilf said:

Cannot remember a game we ve really won the midfield this year and so much talk about strikers.   We havent been good enough this year for all the reasons stated and doubt our formation has a great deal to with it.    Opponents have bossed us, defenders not given us a sniff and we ll never know how many of our squad have been good enough.     It doesnt seem to be many.   If we had 3 or 4 of Adams quality then things may have been different.    This treadmill has been going much faster than we could have managed and I think the learning curve much steeper than most of us expected.

Should we just accept that we can't recruit players who can compete at Step 2? In the past we've always had a player (or two) on whom the common consensus was 'he could probably play higher up the pyramid'. I'm talking about the likes of Corey Whiteley, Josh Davison, Mo Faal, Marcus Wyllie, Manny Maja, Junior Mubiayi...etc. Excluding the loanees - who have come in with a certain pedigree already - since he took over, who has Gavin brought in that you would say has added serious quality? You might point to Rhys - but I don't think he will play any higher than NLS. Then you would look at the likes of Ollie Knight, Billy Leonard, Louis Birch, Jack Smith, Dylan Adjei-Hersey, Adam Thompson, Lennon Peake, Anointed Chukwu, Tarelle Whittaker...etc. I think those players are either Step 3 or Step 2 squad players at best (taking Adam's injury history into account). So is it down to the manager's lack of connections/recruitment nous?

re the midfield - I initially hoped Christian Scott might be part of the solution. I'm assuming he is injured still as his loan doesn't officially end until 8 February. However, pinning your midfield hopes on an 18yo and 19yo is optimistic at best, and he's yet to do enough.

Edited Thursday at 17:58 by The Crowing Cockerel

[ETFC2001]

We tried to plug the holes with loans and it didn’t work really. As technical as Tuck is, he’s physically lacking.

I think Peake could play higher though.

Dan Cox’s loan is now over I would imagine as he posted a little farewell message on Instagram. Didn’t do a whole lot but I don’t know how you standout in a team that isn’t very good.