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Considering the fact we won this game, I’m having a job getting massively excited about Eleven Men 2 Twelve Men 0. Yes, there were some moments of brilliance, just as there were moments of outright ordinaryness. The first 15 minutes looked like a side that had just had Apollo 13 shoved up its arse and the fuse lit. But seriously, I think I must have walked into 2006 again. Or even 1996. I can’t get my head around beating FGR simply because I feel I was denied a decent game today. This isn’t a selfish Premiership-esque boo-the-team-off-at-half-time-because-you-are-drawing-sack-the-manager sense of entitlement. Instead, it was seeing a game that was looking promising and then had the life punched out of it. Simply put, the referee out there should not be officiating our games again. I cannot think of the last occasion where an official has managed to take the worst excesses of authoritarianism and incompetence and mixed them together. Sure, we’ve had referees who have totally flipped out (Mr Fish). We’ve had the likes of Martin Bodenham, Barry Knight and Jeff Winter in the WFC era, the latter of which proves the adage that the best referees are the ones you don’t hear from. This one? Put it this way – if he was a Nazi dictator, in charge of sending the Jews to Auschwitz, he would have ended up filling the gas tanks with water. Missing blatant handballs is bad enough. But when you’re missing elbows that puts one of our centre backs off the field for three stitches, meaning that we’re down to ten men for a good 10 minutes, and when you’re failing to put any sort of control on an opposition that didn’t have much more than brute strength, and when somebody like Gregory is hacked down yet nothing is done but a far lesser offence for the opposition is blown up for…. Oh yeah, and did I mention their #31 putting his head up against DK in a rather aggressive manner? And DK ended up getting booked? Thank god our number nine had enough nouse to know he was being targetted for a red card after that. I did feel my enjoyment of what should have been a decent enough game was pretty much ruined. When you go 2-0 up that quickly, you can either sit back and give everyone a nervy rest of the game, or you can push forward and net some pretty high scores. We did the former, unfortunately, and cunt in black aside we were quite, well, ordinary at times… Then again, there were reasons for that. Losing BJ for the football equivalent of the blood bin really didn’t help. It seemed to unsettle us, and thankfully FGR was as cack as their friendly official. Not only that, but having to deal with more stoppages, dropped balls and various minor infrigements was clearly upsetting our stride. But I reckon our obvious nervousness came down to what happened last week too. Be honest, there was always just a little niggle in the back of your mind that if FGR were to come back, it would be Workington revisited. And I think the players knew that too. There was only one side with the skill you expect from a BSP side (ie, us), but I don’t think our confidence has returned sufficiently enough to go 2-0 up so quickly, then kill the game off totally. Those who have watched our last few games, certainly all the ones since Mansfield, will know that we haven’t looked our best. We haven’t really looked like the unit we can be – there’s a feel that we’ve gone back to about late August/September again, where a setback can end up reverberating for a couple of weeks. Part of that is down to the personnel changes we’ve made. Nobody can argue with the impact Nathan Elder has made, and his link up today with another newbie, Will Hendry, will cause plenty of problems for our opponents this season. But we’ve had situations whereby Glenn Poole comes in, makes an impact then becomes injured again. The jury is still out on Danny Blanchett too, and it’s rather worrying when people are talking about switching BJ back to left back. Poor Jon Main must be wondering why he’s warming the bench right now (although he would have probably ended up with a broken ankle today), and when you add in Monty’s injuries and the inconsistency of the likes of Kennedy and Godfrey, it’s hard to get any sort of settled side. That’s why we won the BSS last season – we didn’t need to keep rotating. Christ, I think DK deserved lifetime BUPA membership after the 2008/09 campaign… Anyway, enough moaning. We got three points after all. Plus points: We won. At home. Clean sheet. Blistering first 15 minutes. Nathan Elder. DK. Will Hendry. Minus points: Guess. The referee’s a…: To cap it all off, the officials reportedly cost us over £400 in expenses. This despite the fact he came all the way from…………….. Crawley. Was he coming in a limo with finest champagne on draught and a warm goat waiting for him afterwards? Would explain his “performance” if so. Them: Looked like Hendon, played a bit like them too. Pretty, ahem, physical, and in truth you can see why they’re fighting relegation. Kind of the sort of teams we came across in the middle section of the Blue Square South – should beat them but never quite make it easy. There was some ex-Franchise contingent in their ranks, including their #31, which explains his knuckledragging stance. Get the feeling we won’t be playing them next season somehow. Point to ponder: Admittedly, I don’t read the programme as much as I should, but Erik’s rather sobering figure of £120,000 per year for total cost of treatment/wages for injured players should focus minds a bit. We’re not in a cheap division any more, and I certainly think that making private insurance at AFCW for players is a good idea – reputations are built like that, and on a more cynical basis we get more for our money if we get them fitter quicker… But this does beg the question, why do we seem to get so many injuries? I think this is semi-answered by yet another game against brutish opposition where we struggle more than we should – we’re not tough enough. OK, we stood up to them well enough today, but you don’t get the impression any of our lot bar DK and Elder would knee an opposition player in his dangly bits. Our skill level is undoubtedly there, but think about it – how many injuries did WFC get between 1986 and 1989? Oh, and anyone notice the absence of Mike Rayner today? Guess we can’t afford his overtime. Meet the manager: Live and direct from the weights room in KM…. Terry Brown on Forest Green Rovers Got to say, how impressed I was with TB’s calm and collected approach to the cock in black. He obviously took time out to assess his performance in a rational way, especially when the various dictaphones and cameras were turned on… Truth is stranger than fiction: (1) Phillo’s comments just before the game – “Proudly wearing the captain’s armband – Paul Lorraine”. What the fuck was that bit of hyperbole about? A sly dig at John Terry? Or something more…? (2) Seeing the queue for the Luton game afterwards. Which was about 40 people. This was at 5.35pm. Get the feeling your editor might be looking to mug an OAP for their ticket if he forgets to wake up on Monday. (3) WUP on sale today, apparently. I say “apparently” because I didn’t see any on sale, nor did I see anyone with a copy. Was it? (4) Realising our next league game at KM is in March. Anything else? Yeah. Thinking about the upcoming games we have – Cambridge, Luton and Oxford. Never mind the difficulty of either of them – I’m looking at them and just started to treat them as “normal” games. Remember how you stained your pants in excitement when you found out we were playing Luton first game of the season? At how Oxford and Cambridge coming down was a big thing? Don’t get me wrong here, I want to go to all three of them (what’s the betting I end up going to none of them whatsoever? That will really lower my mood) but they’ve sort of lost that “wow” factor in a way. I’ve been to Luton before, and Oxford won’t be much different to the Den. But then, that’s a good thing. You know it’s a big game so the players will be up for it, but losing the awe factor should (in theory) make us concentrate and play like we know we can. We’ll be backed by big followings for all three of them anyway, and it’s quite possible that the odd scalp may well be heading our way… Also, it comes to something when you look at the next three fixtures, realising they’re all ex-League clubs and just think “well, we’ve got a good chance of beating Cambridge” as though you’re looking through a BSS fixture list. People may believe that these sorts of fixtures prove we’ve “made it”. Perhaps it’s treating them as “normal” may prove that theory somewhat more true… So, was it worth it? It should have been. In a nutshell: Here comes the cunt in black, a man you will remember… Yes, a second helping from last night. From the SW19 Welsh Militant branch, no less. Before we get to that, and whilst your editor is now thinking it’s Wednesday instead of Tuesday, looks like it’s going to be a replay after all. The OS’s headline is pretty blunt :
So I think we can safely assume that T&M get another opportunity to charge us £10 again. Although the final decision lies with the LSC bods, one assumes that we liased with T&M last night over it. Sure we’ll find out the details in due course, although one suspects our management team wouldn’t want another game. Though the rate we’re playing recently, we need all the practice we can get… There may well be an article in the pipeline, which depends on whether I can get round to doing it. In the meantime, feel free to read what Tu7or has scribed below… Plays in Merton 1 v Not Entirely Sure It Wants To 0 Match Abandoned 75 mins after Referee decides that neither team deserves to. There now follow a Personal Polemic Broadcast by the People Who Hate People Party: <wrapped up in a burroughsian cut-up style report on both the game and the DT election> It’s great to be back. Seriously. And it’s wonderful to see what can be achieved with a local council that actually wants to help you build a stadium and sustain a presence in your borough. But hey – you guys know that from your dealings with The Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames, right? Good luck with that. Always cover your bases! By the way, glad to hear that the good burghers of Lower Morden still don’t want “Wimbledon FC” playing at Imperial Fields. The fucking affordably-housed retards. As for the men’s first team: Well, call me a romantic, but I was expecting something other than a shitty squad of under-achievers and a few of the under 18’s looking like they were performing a contemporary arthouse dance piece entitled “Deer In Head Lights” against the far superior boot-and-run pikey presence of both Tooting AND Mitcham (this club always reminds me of that scene in The Blues Brothers “It’s okay, we play both types of pikey here…”). However, it looks like TB had a groundhog day decided to attempt a double cup capitulation to make room for the close-but-no-cigar faltering 7th or 8th place finish at the fag-end of the season. By the way, you realise, of course, that you are NEVER going to win the FA Trophy. You’ve got more chance of securing a brownfield site in SW19 on which to build your Kentucky Fried Stadium and the ensuing enabling development. The first 18 minutes passed in a blur. Or maybe I was distracted by a number of people who believed I was dead. Or Canadian. Or possibly both. Anyway, according to my notes, one of the AFCW players, possibly Main, got through on goal and attempted a daring double-bluff pass back to their keeper. Gosh darn it, it almost worked too! Truth is Stranger than Fiction *1: Meeting one of the DT Board candidates, who promptly tried to bribe me with an individually sealed pod of Marmite Cheddar. I realise that the Jennings Block Vote is a highly powerful and prized feather in your cap, but to think I’m so easily swayed… oh, what’s this? A free soft drink voucher from Burger King?… As for the AFCW/Dons Trust nexus? Nobody said it was going to be easy. Riding the coat tails of the men’s first team up the pyramid with little thought about the necessary socio-political infrastructure is a mistake we’ve already made once (1977-1985 ring any bells?). However, this time we actually own the club and, with some solid and dependable stalwarts who actually give a shit about the football club, we should be on our way. And there’s been some great success, both on and off the pitch. However, there’s also been some failure, and we should not continue to be frightened to address this. And sooner rather than later. It’s actually a good thing that (home) support has levelled out to around 3,700, because we haven’t yet hit “YIKES! Full to breaking point! Help! We’re a Massive Club!” at KMTFSSBCRR. This buys us some time, but it also highlights that I was right about at least one thing: that without investment of time and effort into increasing local support for the club (be that from Kingsmeadow and all points outwards, or from Wimbledon Station/Plough Lane/the junction of Morden and Dorset Roads) the club gains no purchase, either physical or emotional, within the community it purports to represent (rather than currently representing only the fans of the previous incarnation of the club it purports to represent). Growth is good. Putting down roots is good. Putting people in place of the DT so they can help create a strategy for encouraging those psychogeographical roots is good. On 20 minutes, a player whose name may or may not have been Judge decided to have a little lie down in the middle of the pitch. Overheard commentary on Ian Pollock’s Obsessive Compulsive KitKat Disorder: “Is that tea?” “Yes. There’s a teabag in it.” A football club that remains divorced from what it purported to believe in doesn’t deserve to claim to represent “Wimbledon”. Do you want to know what impact AFCW has on me as a resident of SW19? None. Do you know how much information I receive on the club in the local area? None. Do you know how much my neighbours know about AFC Wimbledon? Zero. Do you know the level of visibility the club has in its historically local area? Zero. Now, the directors of AFC Wimbledon made it clear that they saw the role of the DT as to “sit in the corner, keep the majority shareholding warm and keep your mouth shut”. To borrow a phrase from politics, they are like the Republican party, whose stated aim was “to have a government small enough that you could drown it in a bath tub”. Fiscal rectitude and a cast-iron self-belief in your ideologies are admirable qualities: the club needs a firm hand on the tiller. Unfortunately, when you end up leaving no room to breath or to engage independently for some capable chartmakers, sail maintenance engineers and compass-polishers, you might find that taking ownership of every single possible “exciting” aspect of running your tight ship ends up strangling the joy out of the journey. The club needs new blood. It needs, finally, to drag the Dons Trust out of the bath, pump the remaining water out of its poor lungs and breath life back into an important aspect of the club: of which we’re all a part, no matter how disengaged from the actual “running” we’ve gotten. Tudor’s nuts: Tonight, on the barrier, we had mixed peanuts and raisins. Also a bag of Thai chilli crackers on the side. However, the evening required chocolate of some description to round it off. Chocolate was sorely missed – but not enough to even contemplate sipping on some hot-chocolate-flavoured water <limp bizkit flashback> from their burger bar. Oh no. On 35 minutes, being quite rightly delighted with the theoretical success of his previous Double-Bluff Pass Back Gambit, the player who might have been Main upped the ante and cunningly went for a Quadruple Bluff Pass Back to their keeper. The bastard was, however, ready for such an evil and cunning plan. The lovely, lively and diverse range of candidates which have, by some coincidence, come out of the woodwork to take the places of the AFCW directors (who are finally able to keep their hands on the tiller, and hopefully realise that the ship won’t sink if some other people are in charge to chart the course and look out for rocks and giant white whales) proves to me that I wasn’t taking crazy pills all this time. That there are people out there who, given the responsibility to keep a watching brief and administrate and consider long-term political aims and metaphysical aspects to “being a club”, while the more football-centric minded can (still) get on with running a football club and ordering as many left backs and toilet rolls as they like. And the world doesn’t come crashing around our ears. Yippee! However, on about 40 minutes, the stadium entered an anomalous Messner-Rosenfeld Bridge and AFCW suddenly decided to start passing to their own players and start running directly – sometimes even with the ball – at the T&M goal. A decent shot was pushed wide by their goalie. Another decent crack looped just wide of the post. And just before half time, a sprawling header back across the goal went, well, back across goal. Fuck knows what happened for those five minutes. Luckily, the ref, who missed nothing if not everything the entirety of the game, was wise to AFCW’s pernicious tactics of trying to play competitive football and blew for half time. Is anybody out there?: Moving over to the fascinatingly retro 60’s style Soviet era stand at the far end, with its scratchy delay speakers giving off a queer Lovecraftian rendition of “More Than A Feeling” at half time, gave me the creeps. Especially with my back to the ill-lit wasteland, stretching into the gloom, dotted with odd scattered scrub which cast wretched shapes in the shadows – not to mention that large cargo container, brooding menacingly just at the back of the stand like a bloated blue whale carcass, far from home … Back to your regular programming: Two minutes after the start, another useless shitty pinball pass in the middle of the pitch fell kindly in the vicinity of the T&M No 9, the only player on either team, apparently, who fancied, like, running with the ball and shooting. He ran with the ball. He shot. And scored. 47 Mins: Sandy Lane 1 Plough Lane 0 The good thing about all this allegedly “cold” weather (try -25C in Calgary, you fucking poofs) is that you know the pitch is going to be nice and firm and you won’t need to bring your wellies… ahhh, the proustian rush… happy times back in the Combined Counties League. Does this make me a bad person? Yeah, probably. Go piss up a rope, fuckface. 57 minutes in, after some fucking about in the final third, there was some weird ricochet-type clash with the T&M goalie and the ball looped up…. and fell just the wrong side of the right hand post. The crowd wasn’t quite sure how to react. So we didn’t. At 9.10pm, the T&M no 9 found himself on yet another break away. The AFCW defender tried tugging him, but only succeeding in falling down himself. Obviously not strong on multi-tasking then. With just the goalie to beat, the No 9…. Shot wide. To make up for it, the ref booked our defender. 9.16 pm – And then the evening’s entertainment was brought to a discombobulated end: By one of our under 16’s falling over on the (black?green?) ice and hurting his poor lickle bum-bum. The referee simultaneously waving players away and trying to call over the captains, muttering something under his breath and then blowing his whistle extravagantly, like he was a referee from Ecuador in the 1994 World Cup. Apparently, it was all off. So us fuckfaces really could go piss up a rope now. Truth is Stranger than Fiction *2: An infamous guestbook spammer had snuck into the game by wearing his fluorescent green cycling jacket and pretending to be a Steward. To take the pisstake one step too far (as is his wont) after the game got called off he was one of the first to lead the calls for a refund. Most Importantly: Vote for your favourite 2,3, or 4 candidates in the DT Board, and let them get on with avoiding custard pie fights with Nick Draper, steering talk of a stadium in or around Upper Merton, coming up with lovely plans for an integrated social plan for increasing membership and getting local residents interested and then keeping them informed. Cause that’s the only way that the football club called AFC Wimbledon is going to start putting down actual roots in its geographical area (be that blooming out from Norbiton, or flourishing from both sides of the boundary), instead of just being a “fans’ club” – i.e. a club for fans of the former Wimbledon FC. Cos we know that isn’t a very large demographic. 8 years is a long time. Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past: be it those of the 70’s, 80’s, 90’ or 00’s. But most of all, let’s not be sitting round in 2018, wondering why nobody in Merton still isn’t interested in us, and how the hell are we going to extend the John Smith Stand to increase seating capacity by yet another 1000 for all the away fans we’re now getting in Division 3 Sponsored by Charmin? Plus points: A local game. For local people. Thanks for the money, assholes. Don’t let the turnstiles smack you on the arse on the way out. Minus points: The ground temperature in the far left hand corner of the pitch, apparently. The referee’s a…: fucking retarded bell end. 90 minutes being too much for him and his ilk, the useless workshy tosser. Did it really take him 75 minutes to realise it was a bit chilly out there? Or did his mates make such fast work of breaking into your car and stealing your cd player and handheld nintendo iphoto gamestations, so he knocked off early so they had enough time to do the rounds flogging your cd player in the local pubs before Red Hot Channel came on at midnight. You: I can tell that moral victory/replay and the ensuing potential of a double cup win has your rubbing your nipples with excitement. Them: Hey, anyone who likes playing their football in Merton is okay by me – even if they look and play like a poor man’s Notts County <insert a polariod of your Trust sell your controlling share in the club and apply the relevant degree of topical irony here> Me: At least I got home in time to watch Glee on E4+1 Point to ponder: Wow. Do you really want to start me off again? And don’t forget to vote for your favourite Dons Trust Candidates, or else I’m going to stand on a “Shit-In-The-Front-Gardens-Of-Anybody-Who-Doesn’t-Agree-With-My-Hardcore-Agenda” uber-manifesto next time. Now fuck off back to Norbiton, you bandwagonning Football League Conference shitbags. Kissy kiss kiss Tu7or Well, what a complete and utter fucking farce…. I’m not going to bother with any sort of match action from Tooting and Mitcham tonight. We were 1-0 down apparently (I was sensibly in the bar when the goal went in), and despite quite a plethora of first teamers out there (including Jon Main, Pullen, Kennedy and Judge), we were, well, meh. It was one of those half-hearted teams where the real top players don’t bust a gut, the fringers are too short of proper match time to make a difference, and the youngsters are thrown in at the deep end without any armbands. In short, a typical Senior Cup game. We needed a really comprehensive performance, but when you see TB having a cup of tea 20 minutes beforehand in the bar, you know it was going to be one of those nights. Sort of a glorified training session, only not quite so much fun. Maybe just being there was punishment enough for Saturday? You do wonder what the point of putting these sorts of teams out is – the first teamers aren’t going to go full pelt, and it’s a sort of mish-mash. The fact we were losing is as bad as it sounds, but not that surprising… If the game was forgettable, the outright farce of the whole event wasn’t. First things first – £10 for a London Senior Cup game is a complete joke. And a fucking one at that. Did they have to employ extra stewards? Did Mitcham Police send 100 coppers for the Merton derby? Or was it a case of, T&M is local enough for plenty of people and they’ll pop along anyway? I think I know the answer, especially as close to 500 turned up. Needless to say, and I know this is a contentious point for many, we weren’t offered any ticket stubs. So, you were on your own if the game got called off. This is what pissed people off afterwards – you paid £10 to get into a minor cup competition, and depending on the LSC committee we’ll probably end up paying it again. And let’s face it, we all know that most people will turn up again to a contest that isn’t so far away from your doorstep. That is assuming there is a replay. We await the actual ruling on this, though a quick glance at the FA’s rulebook doesn’t state what happens if a game is called off after a certain time – will this count as a 1-0 loss? Do we replay? Do we stand naked in the middle of Morden High Street, playing a game of Scissors/Paper/Rock? At time of writing, it’s due to be a replay apparently, though we await official confirmation of that. We never seen to have much joy in senior cup competitions as it is. We all remember the grief over the Slurrey Senior, especially when we were made to play that Met Police game when the organisers knew damn well we were getting chucked out. Lest we forget Coney Hall, with the most dangerously inept bit of “security” I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness in 25+ years of sports watching. And now this. It’s not so much down to the actual reason why the game was called off. SW19 Towers was pretty frost-bitten this morning, and one corner of the pitch (where your editor spent the second half) was pretty slippery. Reportedly, the pitch wasn’t playable anyway according to one of our players, and the ref was told, but he still let the fixture go ahead anyway. Remember that game from the Ryman days when one of our players did a nasty injury in the warmup on a frozen pitch (Billy Rickay IIRC)? Plus ca change, as they’ve never said in Tooting. What is worth pointing out by the way, is that according to one of the T&M players, those with studs were still upright whilst those with moulds on their boots were slipping over. Whether it was called off because of the hardness of the ground I don’t know, but if some players were OK and some weren’t…? I’d like to think for any replay that T&M offer free entry or a reduced entry fee of about £3 (fiver at the absolute maximum). I’d certainly like to think that in a similar situation we’d do the same, and chances are we probably would. They may argue that they would lose money on something that ultimately wasn’t their fault. Fair enough, but they did all right out of us tonight, and if it’s a low entry fee for any replay, they may get more people in and therefore more money. Anyway, there will be plenty of more bitching and moaning about this. At least it will distract us from how crap we were… Oh, and Monty is out for 8 months after his Wrexham exploits. Who the fuck has been shagging witches at AFCW? You know, I’m glad I was covering Southampton against Stockport yesterday, because I’m not sure what I would have made of our loss to Workington. At time of writing, I haven’t seen any match “action”, not that I particularly want to either, and all I can go by is JP’s report below and the various reactions from around t’internet and “real life”. One thing jumps out at me though – it felt like the bad old days of the Ryman. Rumours of a bit of unrest in the dressing room, a player (Ben Judge) allegedly having a strop after being substituted, an opposition rather revelling in catching us unawares and I could have been watching Football Hurts again. Couple this with Workington fans enjoying the whole day at our expense, and it’s Theme Park KM time. You know, the place where all visitors go home happy. But then, should we have been surprised? Those with longer memories will remember how poor we were against Boreham Wood in previous rounds. Those who put that particular game out of their minds won’t thank me when I offer them a chance to refresh their memory. There seemed to be a rather unfortunate feeling of deja vu all over again… Let’s be honest – if you go ahead twice on home soil against a lower division side and still end up losing, you do not deserve to be in the competition. Yesterday, we blew it, and it was all our own fault. TB must be outright livid right now – he built us up getting an FAT run (which was more than possible) and now they look as authentic as John Terry’s marriage vows. Christ, I’m angry writing this, and I wasn’t even witness to the game. Worryingly enough, I can well imagine what sort of “contest” it was. I would wager that if I stated that our collective attitude stunk of shit, that we went out there going through the motions, then acted all clueless when the opposition didn’t roll over and die for us, I would get plenty of nods of approval. But then, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? The game against Mansfield seems almost a lifetime ago now. In fact, it almost seems like a blip. We’ve had two piss-poor games on the trot now, and all of a sudden the pressure is on to defeat FGR. Losing games can and does happen, but playing shit in all of them is an experience we’ve yet to properly encounter. Which does make me wonder if it’s now crunch time at AFCW, playing wise. Around about now, we’ll be looking to see who is ready to make the move into full-time with us and who isn’t. Contracts have to be drawn up, budgets have to be set, and the cruel world that is football is about to get even crueller for some of our playing staff. And nowadays, unlike previous seasons under the AFCW banner, the culling will become even more ruthless. Maybe that explains any unrest in the squad right now? The ex-Brentford contingent may be around next season, they may not. But then, the likes of Hatton, Taylor, Kennedy, even Main and Kedwell will be under scrutiny from now until the end of April as well. We’ll be making a big jump from part-time to full-time, and we cannot afford anyone who isn’t – in both senses of the word… We have a chance to get it out of our system tomorrow, when we head along to Tooting and Mitcham in the LSC. TB has already threatened promised that some of yesterday’s players will be forced to step out at Imperial Fields. If that’s the case, then only a win will do. Correction – only a convincing win will suffice. If we struggle with half our first team fringers (or even first-choice first teamers), or dare I say even lose tomorrow, then the writing will be on the wall for some of them. Remember the Holy Trinity last season of Belal, Chris Sullivan and Tony Finn for one of the county cup games? It was one where we lost, painfully too, and only Finn held on until the end of the season. Sullivan and especially Belal never recovered from that “performance”, and should be a lesson to those named tomorrow. One player who won’t be joining us in a full time capacity – or any sort of capacity – is Luke Garrard. According to the OS, we cancelled his contract by mutual consent on Friday because he wanted playing time and we couldn’t guarantee it. It’s always a shame when a long standing player like him departs the scene. With the departure of AL this past week too, I think there are no more signings from the DA era left at the club (I know LT and Quiche returned to AFCW), and another milestone of history is passed. But then, Garrard’s departure symbolises the steps the club has made in just a few short years. If we’re being brutally frank here, he wouldn’t have got many first team games with us now. He certainly wouldn’t have displaced Conroy for any significant time, and if the clock is ticking for Hatton, it certainly was for Luke. When he went on loan for such a long time at BW, you did have that thought in the back of your mind that he wouldn’t return. It’s a shame for him that injury and two successive promotions pretty much put him out in the cold. But it does send a message to the other players : nobody is irreplacable. Especially at this level. I’m sure all of you would like to replace memories of yesterday with something nicer. Sadly, I’m going to let JP ruin your day again with a reminder of how shit it all was… All players have off days. I presume managers do to. Because I cannot think of any other reason how Terry Brown’s message about the importance of the FA Trophy to this club this year could be so disappointingly surrendered. They didn’t listen to him. Make no mistake this loss was due to No Work-ing-at-it 2 Working-a-ton on it 3. They wanted it more; they worked harder for it; they committed themselves to it. Simples. Whilst we can look back at their dubious first goal (I thought it was a blatant push on Brown, others thought it was a soft goal); the subsequent caving in of the ref in seemingly ‘protecting their players’ from any contact; and one or two theatricals to eat up time, this performance lacked the passion you expect from a Wimbledon side, particularly in the cup. Only Nathan Elder seemed to want to put himself about a bit. To actually try and tackle the opposition. Both at 1-0 and 2-1 the team seemed to think the job done. It wasn’t. Of course individual errors like Brown’s for their second goal (I was actually in the loo at the time (others said down to him) – oh and sorry it was me what jinxed it!) didn’t help, but it was the lack of cohesion and willingness to get stuck in that was so blatantly lacking. Time and time again players pulled out of tackles, seemingly worried they might get hurt. It might be nice to be at the top of the fair play league but this was never going to a game where you could get away within putting in hard work and yourself Yet again we had no midfield to talk of; the defence (why wasn’t Lorraine in to start?) was repeatedly left exposed; and when we did attack often Kedwell and Elder were isolated. I’d questioned if it was the right partnership in my notes – they created the first goal between them. So I guessed yes, but by the end….. And why no Main at the end to hold things up a bit…. I think Kedwell isn’t the type of player to support Elder. Yes, he has seemed to go into a slightly submissive role recently. I was also totally flummoxed by the end to see Wellard playing Gregory’s role. I mean this is the only guy in the team with a decent shot from outside the box, playing a defensive role. It did seem TB lost the plot a bit with his team selection and substitutions. But if I’m honest I don’t think we’ve ever had the right midfield at AFCW, ever. It always seems the opposition have the cohesion, the support for their front two, and the shots at goal. Team selection today also seemed to restrict the choices available. No option to put Sam in the middle (as we have in the past) as no replacement at right back on the bench. Hell, Duncan looked quite good when he came on. And Taylor is wasted on the right side. It’s still our Achilles heel. It’s here we will be undone this year. Rampaging thoughts on various aspects of today keep flooding back to me; many I suspect you will find on the WUP guest book. One you may not. AFCW is no WFC when it comes to cup games. At the moment it is too easy for us to be the Burnley instead of the WFC of old. And that needs to change in the cups that matter. Lets hope it also doesn’t roll over into the League form but I suspect it already has… Plus points: Nathan Elder. A good crowd of 2301. Luton lost (in the league) Minus Points: Sorry, Seb Brown today and Kennedy Adjei (What has happened to him?) No midfield all game. No fight. No clue. No plan B (again) The Referee is a …. Various names heard, many quite justified. Seemed to be doing OK until their first goal. After that I think our players lost confidence in his abilities to know the rules of the game and apply them consistently. For example, Keds get booked for verbals; their No 11 gets a talking too along with his captain. Go figure. I was beginning to think he might be related to one of their players he looked so like some of them. Them: Can’t fault them at all. They played an excellent game; their front two gave our back 4 problems all afternoon and their midfield supported them well. They used what little physicality there was in the game to their advantage. Were not by any stretch your normal big northern bastards. Actually team looked quite young and a bit like us (on a good day). Fans seemed really nice too. One guy bought at Golden Goal ticket and then put the ticket back into the pot. If they have financial troubles, we at least owe them a £1. Point to ponder: Was Boxing Day when we thought we’d won promotion? I mean since we’ve seemed to want to coast in games. NYD should have been a wake up call; Mansfield we did ok but that was also a bit of an off day for them (see below); and by all accounts Wrexham wasn’t great making it 3 away defeats on the trot. TB and his team need to get this side back in the mental groove. To many players, to quote someone today, “were mentally elsewhere.” Truth is stranger than fiction: How often do you see a linesman that tall? The officials looked like they’d just popped out of the ‘The Frost Report’ sketch on understanding class! (If you’re not old enough, Google it!) Was this the day Workington got revenge for ’77? It had a touch of a feel that the script had been written before the game had started. Anything else: If you were enjoying Luton losing 2-3 to Ebbsfleet, note Mansfield won at FGR 1-4 after being 1-0 down at HT; and H&Y lost 1-6 to R&D… puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Oh and Wrexham won again L So was it worth it? IF we get into League 2….. In a nutshell: Still need someone with balls in midfield to scare the oppo shitless even when we play this crap. There’s nothing quite like the sight of a football club owner appearing to lose it, especially in an official publication. On the stroke of midnight just gone, the Peterborough owner Darragh McAnthony delivered this gem of a press release that, ahem, rambled a bit. McAnthony, of course, was the infamous Mr X character who a couple of years ago was sniffing around the AFCW skirt looking for a bit of fun. Unsurprisingly, he was told to piss off as we all now know. However, this whole episode does highlight once again SW19’s favourite off-field topic of AFCW, namely the whole funding issue of the club. You’ve heard all the buzz words, catch phrases, cliches etc by now – external investment, sugar daddy, fans club, control etc etc. However, I came across an interesting – and somewhat poignant – article a couple of days ago. Although it was written in 2006, it was about the average wages across the divsions. In fact, here it is. And as a bonus, there’s more here too, from 2009. Digested that? Good. Now, it may have escaped your notice but we have at least six players who were employed by a L2 outfit last season. As that last link shows as well, Luton are allegedly paying a player £1400 a week, and I seriously doubt if we’re paying much below the average for at least some players. Let’s be conservative here, and assume Seb Brown, Monty, BJ, Nathan Elder, Glenn Poole and Danny Blanchett are getting £800 a week for 39 weeks (39 is standard at this level). If you get your calculator/fag packet out and do the sums, that’s £31200 per player per year – times by six and you get £187200. For six players this season alone. And one of them is permanently injured. To put it in perspective, the DT has about 1500 members at £25 a lob. Which equals £37,500. Or one full time player. (UPDATE: One or two have pointed out that the DT’s money isn’t used for playing staff, and it’s used to pay off Barclays etc. It does highlight though how much we need to generate – or get in – and opens up another can of worms whether we take that money from the DT to pay for players etc if push comes to shove) Now, I know we have other sources of revenue (ticket sales, merchandise, sales from Chris Hussey and the all-important cup runs). But when we go full time next season, we’ll have to find the fag-packet sum of £500,000 just for a squad of 16 alone. OK, there are some variables here, like how much we’d really pay the younger players. But I’m going to stick with £500k. Which as you can well imagine, is one hell of a lot to find per season. We have decent sized crowds and are willing to spend our money too, and I’m holding my breath over how we pay that. Imagine being a Gateshead or Handy and having to find that dough? The truth is, it’s a decision we have to make and those two clubs in particular probably don’t. These days, you need to pay L2 wages to be at the top end of the Conference, and there is absolutely no way that the vast majority of the fanbase would want us to remain a mid-table outfit. We couldn’t do that if we tried – I tend to ignore those who claim they’d be happy to remain in the Conference for a while as long as they continued with the club’s current economic model. Give them a sniff of L2 and they’d be up there quicker than a rat up a drainpipe, just like the rest of us sellouts. With all this in mind, I’ve paid a little bit more attention to the upcoming DT elections this time round. You may have seen the election forum, and certainly for the first time I can remember one or two of the candidates may have finally grasped the funding issue. Even though the DT’s problem of abstract terminology and nazel gazing is still all too evident. I’m not joking when I say I lost interest reading many of the responses given. And as this missive I wrote some while back illustrates, the DT doesn’t seem to have as many lawyers, planners and – IMO very under-represented – people who know about the football industry as a Conference-that-wants-to-be-L2 outfit like ourselves wants or needs. Especially now, when the wages bill is about to skyrocket. To my mind, the sooner we get another David Barnard type figure the better. But this comment from one of the candidates did jump out at me:
Exactly. The bottom line is, whether you have this token “one vote” or not, if I came to the club with £50k in my pocket, I know I stand a much better chance of getting taken out to dinner by AFCW. The most influencial person at the club in the near future will be the one who funds the player whose goal takes us up to League 2. Think of Jon Main and how Mike Richardson put his hand in his pocket to buy him. I’ve noticed a subtle shift in AFCW’s language anyway. Remember that Times article? While we were all frothing about Erik’s ill-judged “fundamentalist” comment, he did mention that selling up to a McAnthony would be a “last resort”. So in effect, we’ve gone from never, ever selling up to selling up only if we really, really had to. A very slight shift it may be, but it’s a shift none the less. But then, time and the realities of running a football club do that. Who knows what our collective attitude will be in five years time? If we get the taste for signing the calibers of the Brett Johnsons across the whole pitch, as I think we will, his £31200 a year has to come from somewhere. As the old adage goes, how do you keep them on the farm when they’ve seen Paris? I’m glad that people are thinking more and more about the economics at AFCW. As for Mr X himself, he was the wrong man at the wrong time for us. His brand of “fun” may not have gone down well at KM, but one wonders what happens if somebody else comes along with a greater degree of seriousness… And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we won’t be in the playoffs. Whether it was over-confidence, lack of ability in scouting the opposition or just simply “one of those days” again, I dunno. But those expecting anything other than Celtic Crusaders 1 Harlequins RL 0 yesterday can justifiably feel deflated right now. Forget the “goal”. Yes, I know the linesman may have suffered from a combination of bright sunlight in his eyes and chronic masturbation. But in all honesty, we weren’t good enough to right that wrong. We kept misplacing passes, we kept letting them come onto us, I think we played the grand total of 20 minutes looking somewhat remotely like the side we should be. Although worryingly enough, I am reliably informed that this was better than Chester in October. People wanted to see Elder and DK together, and they got it. Unfortunately, for this game anyway, it didn’t work. The AFCW version of the twin towers ended up looking like the actual Twin Towers. Add the midfield looking like it got lost in North Wales, asked a local where the ground was, and ended up in Ellesmere Port instead. The sooner Steven Gregory returns the better. Oh, and Ross Montague brought a whole new meaning to the term “injury time”, by damaging his knee on 92 minutes. He’s going to be the modern day Gareth Ainsworth or Jon Goodman at this rate. So, now what? To be honest, I don’t know. I think all this game does is put an asterix against our playoff credentials, as in they may not be as real as first thought. Would a genuine playoff team have done what we did in deepest valleyland yesterday? Remember last season when we actually won these sort of contests? This time last week, we were all getting giddy about whipping everyone’s arse in the playoffs, if we didn’t close the 11 point gap at the top beforehand. Needless to say, we’re horseshit again and TB needs to be sacked right this minute. If truth be told though, we’re neither. We’re a decent top ten side at least, probably able to scrape into the playoffs if we get a good run and others slip up. We’d probably end up losing in the playoff semi-finals but could certainly find ourselves in the FAT final with a fair wind. We are, in effect, the same as that very first season in the Ryman Premier (minus the FAT bit). Losing at Wrexham isn’t going to be the end of our season, but it certainly reminds us of how far we’ve got to go. I’ve been trying not to use the Learning Curve™ excuse reason, but that’s what it is. Yesterday, we learnt what it was like to believe our own hype a bit. Be honest, how many of you thought yesterday that we just had to turn up and get the three points? Especially against a side that would be knackered after 70 minutes? What yesterday also taught us is a bit more worrying. We don’t seem to be able to use a contentious call to our advantage. After their goal, we should have been fired up, ready to snarl, and go on a battering ram-esque mission for the remainder of the game, pummelling Wrexham so hard that they consider becoming English. Needless to say, we didn’t. I’m not going to say we didn’t get progressively worse, because we didn’t. We did at least muster some kind of attack in the last 20 minutes, and had we somehow scored we would have won. I mean that. But I felt yesterday a bit like how I felt after Barf City away last season. Nearly but not quite… Plus points: At least it wasn’t 2-0 I suppose. Minus points: We lost. Away. No goals. Monty’s injury. Total contrast to Mansfield and even Alty. The referee’s a…: Nat Lofthouse fan with skewered eyesight to boot. All right, we should have done better anyway, but you can’t win with officiating like that. Literally. Them: If we’re being totally honest with ourselves, they should have won it without the “goal”. Obviously had a point to prove after their long layoff, and sadly for us proved it. Rumours that two of their players walked out before the game obviously didn’t have a effect, unfortunately. Still, it’s interesting to see how far they’ve fallen, even from the days when they sung “You dirty English bastard” to Vinny Jones in the mid-90s at the FAC replay. Although there’s a great story about how they went into admin in the first place – basically, the bloke who was trying to close them down got to the point where he wrote a resignation note, screwed it up, threw it in the bin, then the other directors picked it up and subsequently accepted it. Administration beckoned, and the club is still alive and beating us today. If only Koppout or Hammam had done that. As some of you may know, I’ve ghost-written a couple of reports for the Wales on Sunday on Wrexham games in the South East, so technically they’re my “other” team in this division. It was nice to meet a couple of the Wrexham people on their own turf so to speak, and they were genuinely gracious in victory. Either that or they were a bit embarrassed by their goal… Point to ponder: Have we gone into some sort of reverse since the turn of the new year? By that, I mean we now can’t seem to win away but are pretty decent at KM. Lest we forget that it was victories on the road that kept us going when Fortress KM was Theme Park KM. Thing is, why? Have teams sussed us out? If so, why are we winning at home now? One day, we will work out the perfect method of ensuring getting the home form and away form as equal. Though knowing us, it’ll probably mean we end up losing every week. Meet the manager: Yes, a special from an away game. Your editor put the questions to him… Hmm, not good about Monty is it? Do wonder if we’re going to go on another spending spree, although in this case our hand may be forced by the result of Monty’s diagnosis. We’d have to move quickly if we do, especially as DK is still being linked away from us and the transfer window shuts in not many days time. Perhaps we should spend the transfer money on a witch doctor to keep DK fit. Or any potential suitor away from him. Truth is stranger than fiction: (1) Why does everyone in North Wales have a scouse accent? Fully expected to hear “mind yer car, mister?” at some point (2) Seemed a bit of a cockup on the ticket front – you could pre-purchase tickets beforehand for a reduced price, but they didn’t seem to know where to collect them. Or indeed numbering properly. I await the fun next season when Newport County come to visit. (3) Speaking of our friends from South Wales, anyone seen the BSS table recently? Can’t see them doing a Champions Elect, somehow. Ominious about Bromley though. And try not to laugh at a certain village side lower down… Anything else? Yes. I was in the press area so can’t verify this myself, but apparently the dick who shouted out at the beginning of the minute silence (who was it for BTW?) was from our end. No doubt some cockend who can’t handle his pint of shandy. Out him, and force him to watch Franchise. Besides, you’d know that said penis breath would be the first one whinging if the Mansfield fans had broken Allen Batsford’s silence last week. Also reportedly, some seats in the away section were broken. So, another bill heading our way, and we start getting a bit of a reputation with it. By that, I mean the police and other authorities start looking at us a bit more, and the stewarding starts to get a bit more heavy handed… OK, I don’t particularly want us to get a “reputation” full stop, but if we really must have one, at least have one through 80s style toe-to-toe combat. The sort of stuff that those Cass Pennant books are made of (you know, “we had 50 West Ham against 5000 Man U supporters in the Old Trafford car park and we beat them all up without a scratch”). Seat smashing and breaking one minute silences is a bit common criminal, and just makes us look like nobs. As an aside, while travelling up I saw there was an incident at Keele South services – road blocked off and police cars/vans aplenty. Turns out it was the Welsh Defence League turning up en masse there, on their way to an English Defence League rally in Stoke yesterday. I wonder if a couple of our more, ahem, patriotic supporters made a detour there yesterday? One thing I’ll be interested to read this time next year, the amount of banned fans we have. Could be a surprising number… So, was it worth it? Hmph. In a nutshell: Anws blewog. I have to finish off the South London Press report, plus think of stuff to write about (what remains of) today. It will feature audio of TB’s comments after the game though. No complaints, please. Well, this is nice to wake up to on this FA Trophy Tuesday – an article in the Times. This one is however an article with a difference – for the first time I can remember, the angle is about the realities that are about to face us as we progress. There is the usual “isn’t it marvellous what AFCW has achieved?” arselicking, but Matt Dickinson (who’s sodding tall in the flesh, BTW) has effectively “gone there”. Of course, those who have read this place will have been reading the same conclusions since 2002 OK, there are a couple of quibbles in the article to get out of the way first. I’m not too sure whether Erik’s “fundamentalist” jibe was particularly well advised, even in jest. The whole ground location issue is still an emotive subject for many (myself included), especially if you’ve got a long memory of the WFC days. And remember kids, the same people labelled as such are responsible for you having an AFCW in the first place. Also, would a new construction really cost £14m? I can see the land costing that, although I can’t think of any football club who has either paid for it all themselves or indeed paid it all off in one go. Makes you wonder how other clubs with less support than us manage to construct their own stadia if they are the costs. Although it’s telling that Dickinson used the exact phrase “wherever it is”. Guess he really does read SW19 then. Points of contention aside, I’m glad this has come out, and at this very time when we’re all starting to get giddy again about League football. Finally, a reality check for us all. We’ve been pretty spoilt since 2002 – we’ve had more or less the pick of the best players in the division, we haven’t really been hampered by financial constraints, and we’ve basically been the kings of the division. In other words, we’ve lived a pretty closeted existence. Now? Like last season, this period of “consolidation” hasn’t quite worked out has it? If anything, after Saturday it’s intensified. Today, there’s even more dreams and daring thoughts about the playoff final at Wembley. And to be honest, I wouldn’t want it any other way. There is that feeling of injustice about the whole AFCW “thing” that I don’t think will ever dissipate, even if we do find ourselves in League One by 2018. It’s not that we shouldn’t think like this either, and it’s interesting to see the amount of non-AFCW fans who believe we’ll be a League Two club in less than five years anyway. If you ever go to places like Aldershot or D&R or Barnet, you’ll soon realise that if they can become part of the L2 furniture, so can we. This is why I can’t abide by the (admittedly still very few) comments going about right now that somehow we shouldn’t be pushing for League football if it means we give up – or even dilute – the club’s ownership model. Two things : firstly, we are apparently run like a L2 club anyway, with directors/investors putting money in per year, coupled with transfers and cup runs. And the power and influence will always follow the money trail. Therefore, one could argue the whole ownership model is diluted now anyway. Secondly, such comments remind me of the stories that older Wombles tell me about WFC’s push into the League in the 1970s. There were some WFC directors who didn’t want to go into the League, but Ron Noades was the one who put the effort into what eventually culminated in that day in May 1988. How true Uncle Ron’s real involvement was I don’t know, but it does prove the point that Dickinson makes:
He’s right of course, whether you want to admit it or not. If you want to argue the toss, just imagine how you felt when we won that playoff against Staines. Or clinched the BSS title (bar the mathematics) at the BeaverDome. Were you drinking merrily all night because you were supporting a club that had rules and regulations about club ownership? If you were, then everyone else was celebrating because we got promoted into a higher league. You know, a football thing that football fans do. Still disagree? If you see an Alty fan tonight, just ask them if they’re still happy that we got more votes than them in 1977. Remember to duck after you’ve asked them that. Dickinson has managed to ask the right questions, in the nicest way possible, and for once we feel obliged to answer them. He’s making us think what we really want from AFCW. Is it the ownership model? Is it the fact you’re going with your mates to somewhere near(ish) Wimbledon? Is it us doing well? Is it the push to League football, that is so tantalisingly near right now? All of this? None of this? Whatever the answer is, we’re about to find out. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll continue to develop the AFCW brand by stealth, eventually pushing the DT into some kind of Chelsea Pitch Owners association, which is where its long-term future will lie. We will become a League side eventually, and like the challenges we’ve faced thus far, we’ll overcome them well enough. Remember how apprehensive you were this pre-season? The BSP doesn’t seem so bad and scary now, does it? In more than the odd case, we’ll simply end up wondering what all the fuss was about. We can thank Matt Dickinson for this article, not just for the national publicity, but to ask questions I believe too many of our fans shy away from asking. His report may be the most important catalyst of this weekend, without us realising it. While writing this, the list of DT candidates came out. There’s a lot of interest in the four places up for grabs, which surprises me but perhaps it shouldn’t. Maybe the spectre of League football has motivated people this time round? It’s certainly very interesting to note that three of the candidates are ex-WISA top brass. Even more interesting that at least two of the individuals were directly involved in these discussions with Merton and Koppout, though I stand to correction. Maybe, just maybe, Dickinson’s comments may be more pre-emptive than first thought…? So, our first game under our new guise of Brentford Old Boys, and we gave a masterclass that would have not looked out of place at Griffin Park. Maybe. OK, it’s easy to get excited and over-optimistic, but Gamekeepers 2 Stags 0 was pretty good. For probably the first time since the season started, we looked like a team that could make a step up to the next level. All this with at least five players who have started less than fifteen games between them. See, up until today we’ve played well enough, but there was always a sense that maybe we were ever-so-slightly punching above our weight a little bit. Not significantly, but drawing against Luton and Cambridge felt like we hung on a bit against them. In other words, we were in the playoff zone but not a playoff level side. Hopefully not for the last time, we saw instead a side that took the game by the throat early on – none of the two-goals-down-by-half-time approach that we’ve seen too often this season. And just as pleasing, a side that is starting to learn how to defend and kill the game off. Wonder if that is down to a certain B Johnson back in the centre? It’s early days of course, but I got the impression that we want to give it a real go this season now. Both from the players and the club itself. We may not do it, and if I’m being honest we probably won’t. But right now, we sit fourth in the table, see we’re 11 points behind the leaders and with everyone’s backlog of fixtures to get through think to ourselves, “hmm….” Seeing Elder afterwards, he really seemed happy to be here. There’s an interview with him later, but suddenly the possibility of losing DK doesn’t seem quite so horrific. When he netted after two minutes, you could see him not only lift that weight off his shoulders, but package it up and FedEx it back up to Shropshire with a handwritten “told you so” attached to it. More than one comment was made that he reminded people of John Fashanu. With luck, that’s the 1986 version of Fash and not the 1996 vintage… While he deserved the MoM, the others deserve kudos too. Blanchett settled in at LB pretty well, people are praising Hendry and Poole and even better we know if any of them get injured we have adequate replacements. The game? Well, the start we had wasn’t bad, was it? I reckon the early strike may have put Mansfield out of the game because by the time they settled down a bit we were 2-0 up. We really did look like we had a point to prove after Handy – not only to the rest of the division but ourselves too. And yes, we proved it all right. Whether some of the more established players were upping their game because of the newbies is a matter for debate. Right now, it’s almost impossible to remember how much rancid dogshit Handy on NYD was. But one got the impression if Mansfield had pulled a goal back, they’d be fighting like fuck to keep our third out… I’d like to see their offside goal again, if only safe in the knowledge that we can’t replay the game and have it awarded. Plenty of underpants were about to be shoved into the nearest Indesit, put it that way. But all in all, we were pretty good all round. Christ, even I almost enjoyed myself. I said “almost”…. Plus points: We won. At home. Against a fellow playoff team. Clean sheet. Nathan Elder’s debut – best ever in the AFCW era? Rest of side not too shabby either. Kept going for the third even at 2-0 up and with 10 minutes left. Minus points: Were there any? The referee’s a…: Dear oh fucking dear. Remember when one of our players got upended, we went on and slotted it in the net only to be called back for……. offside? Apparently, he was from the Ryman, which may have explained his white stick. Them: If truth be told, I feel a bit like them as I do about Stevenage – they’re up there for a reason but I still don’t believe we’re inferior to them. Don’t get me wrong, they could (and probably should) have caused us problems at times, and they are a bit physical, but I can’t see them in L2 next season. Needless to say, we’ll now be at home watching them stuff York 5-0 in the playoff final… Seemed decent enough though, off the pitch. Certainly enough of them, though as usual didn’t hear much from the KRE. Did they take as many as York? Really didn’t like their away kit though… Oh, and special mention goes to their keeper, Alan Marriott. Pulled off a couple of blinding saves towards the end, and deserves your love and kisses for saying that we’re looking to get back into the Football League. If ever we need another goalie… Point to ponder: Was it me or did the first 45 minutes go by really slowly? Seriously, I must have looked at my watch on 25 minutes twice, once to see how long we’d played, and again to confirm that it wasn’t as long as I thought. Normally when you’re winning it’s supposed to fly by… Meet the manager: Hopefully with better audio quality for 2010, here is TB’s post match interview: TB talks about Mansfield – click here What struck me was how many players will be on loan simply for playing time (Monty’s name was eyebrow raising, though I suppose with Elder muscling his way into contention now his chances will be limited). But as he said, he doesn’t want a squad that is unwieldly… Speaking of our new hero, here’s him speaking afterwards. Nathan Elder talks after Mansfield – click here Sorry about the beginning, I was a bit late into the interview. Interesting that he was mentioning how many people he knows down here – trust me, he looked like he was buzzing afterwards. Three’s a crowd: Only 3584 there today, which is a bit disappointing. Maybe there’s still a few roads in deepest Surrey still snowed under, thus keeping many a scared Womble indoors and listening to WDON? Either that or the pissing rain beforehand put some off. Those who did turn up though did make a noise. Guess we were all glad to get outside. Or it could be that we were playing well… Truth is stranger than fiction: (1) Beating an ex-League side (not including Aldershot) in competitive football for the first time in the AFCW era. OK then, we’ve also beaten Rushden and Kiddy. But this was the first club you consider as part of the League furniture, IYSWIM. Weirder still, it felt more like “job done” than anything giantkilling. (2) Wondering if I should blackmail the father of a teenage boy, who repremanded him for looking at Redtube and not sticking to Youporn and 8tube because of all the spyware on his computer. And no, I’m not making this up. Changes are though, I won’t… (3) “One Mike Rayner” – the TE to our physio. Even our man with the magic sponge gets his own chant. (4) Good to hear the minute silence for Allen Batsford, as in not hearing a dickybird from anyone. He would have been proud of this performance today. Anything else? Yes. Doesn’t this prove the saying of “success breeds success”? Thanks to our cup run(s) of the last couple of seasons we can now afford to buy or loan the likes of Elder/Blanchett/Poole. And we’ve seen the difference that makes just this very afternoon. I imagine that the wages of L2 level players is higher than the average Conference one, and I expect Elder and co aren’t coming cheap (even if they’re not “our” players). Once again, it’s a further illustration of the actual financial costs of running an ambitious Conference outfit. I’m led to believe that our actual funding isn’t too dis-similar to a typical L2 outfit, namely a group of investors/directors are keeping the club going with some money from the usual attendances/merchandise/sales. Which is why I might pay a little bit more interest to the upcoming DT elections this year (admittedly starting from an interest level of about zero), simply to see what candidates are still dealing with the abstract concepts of fan ownership and those who have grasped the reality of paying for the likes of our new signings. SW19 has annoyed everyone made great play over external investment in the club from about 2002, and now it’s finally starting to sharpen peoples’ minds. Want to see the quality on show today all season, every season? It will cost you. I’ve only ever endorsed one candidate for the DT since it started – Xavier Wiggins – and I’m waiting to see if I might double that tally. I’m not a DT member so what I say is irrelevant, but I may change this stance should more candidates start taking his approach. I may not hold my breath… So, was it worth it? Oh yes. In a nutshell: Stag dos have never been so much fun.
Anyway, it looks like we have been busy in the transfer market haven’t we? We’d heard the odd smattering of rumours, like we were after Bas Savage (who as it transpires is out injured anyway). A rumour that sent many a panicked Google search to see how rubbish he was. And then along comes Nathan. So, the SP on him. Well, he’s ex-Brentford for a start. Believe he was in the same side as Monty, and indeed made his Bees debut against……….. wait for it …………. Mansfield. Oh, the irony. I don’t know whether he was around when Glenn Poole was at Griffin though. He’s also 6 ft 1 or 6 ft 3, depending on whether you believe the Shrewsbury OS or Wiki. A bit more worryingly, Shrewsbury fans don’t seem to be slashing their wrists at his departure. Not only that, but he was transfer listed when Shrews lost to Alan Boon’s classless bandwagon jumpers in the FAC. Unsurprisingly, TB is a bit more optimistic about him. From the OS:
So in other words, he’s a big lump. Suppose him replacing DK tomorrow may make a few bowels twitch, although if you remember last season and indeed times this campaign, we haven’t got a like-for-like subsitute for him. Until now, that is. In the worst case scenario, if DK does get sold to Franchise for £1.50, we’re not suddenly left with a massive void up front, like we were in 2008/09. And yes, I am including Kezie Ibe in that. Guess we’ll wait and see what he does. Perhaps the most intriguing bit of info though is that like Danny Blanchett, he’s on loan until the end of the season. Indeed, these comments on the Shrewsbury OS make me wonder…:
Bold bits mine. Before I found this, I wondered if we were looking to properly go full time this summer. And by that, I mean signing the likes of Blanchett and Elder on more permanent deals when the summer comes. This might yet happen, but maybe this is instead a push for this season into the playoffs and beyond? So much for the mid-table mediocrity that we were all hoping for this season. Chances are, going “properly” full time is still on the agenda – depending on necessity, of course. Right now, I’m not too sure what our status is on that score – we train a lot more but some people still aren’t full time, which makes it a bit of a half-way house. And not a little bit confusing. If we somehow go up this season, we couldn’t remain even semi part time for long. Even if we don’t, it does seem like we’re becoming full time by stealth, which is no bad thing. The Conf has more than the odd story of sides who go full time then wish they hadn’t… All this movement does make it more likely that players will be on their way out. You would assume Derek Duncan is one of the first on the list – he has a “virus” tomorrow, which will make peoples’ eyes roll for some reason. Strange, that. The rumour mill is suggesting that Andy Little and Luke Garrard might be on their way too. Can’t verify the validity of such claims, but if true it will be an unsurprising if slightly sad ending for both of them. Both have been here since the DA days, and both do serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come (and how much better the whole club is now) in just a few short years. Even if Garrard has a, ahem, “lively” personality. Speaking of Stig, I can’t help thinking of this article in the SLP. Especially these comments:
Hope he never read this place then. Actually, if he is on the out list, then it will be a shame. He was a pretty decent defender for us, although when he went to Boreham Wood “to get fit”, you do start wondering if there’s something more to it. A month here or there on loan, yes, but this felt a bit odd. Mind you, that’s how quickly we’ve moved up – these days, we sign players from Brentford rather than Bishops Stortford. Finally, the Mansfield game is on. In many ways it feels like the new season is starting again. If so, let’s hope Handy on NYD was just a typical pre-season drudgefest… |
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