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« on: September 14, 2008, 12:01:59 PM »
My thoughts from yesterday's game:
- I suspect that even if we'd put out our best eleven, organised into the best possible formation, we'd still have lost yesterday. Stevenage looked a very good side, so I don't think we should get too furious about this particular result. It's the ones that have gone before that have put us in the mire.
- Particularly away from home, we have to start with Johnson or if not him, O'Neill. We need a target man. Little and Denham up front, away from home, does not work. When it got switched to Little on his own up front (with Denham on the right and Elam on the left), I really did begin to despair - if I never have to watch Little play up front on his own again, I'll die a little bit happier. And then, just for a final flourish, we switched to Denham on his own upfront with Colin playing right wing. Madness.
- My concern, as it was in the first half of last season, is that GH is not getting the best out of the players he has. The dropping of Doughty seems to me an admission of failure to get him to do the job he was signed to do. You can already feel GH's mistrust of skill players is going to cause problems with Elam (whom we, incidentally, should really get behind rather than heckle - he's exactly the kind of class player we need and that was his first start, after all). We're not getting anything like the kind of performances from Greg Young that we got last year.
What hurt a lot of Alty fans yesterday was that the team looked callow, uncertain and flat - I think this comes from not being given a positive gameplan for games like this. The people in charge of the club have banged on about being part-time etc. so much that the players look like they don't believe we have any right to compete with teams like Stevenage. The part-time thing gives us an excuse to fail, an excuse we're currently taking.
I think this squad is good enough to stay up but based on results so far, we're not going to. Draw your own conclusions.