Over the winter period we've been shown how far off the top we are currently - and the good news is that it's nowhere near as far as we thought it would be at the start of the season.
A good goalkeeper doesn't just do the basics; he gets his defence out of jail once or twice a game. Thompson does neither. Much like proven goalscorers, good goalkeepers are tough to find - particularly mid season. I fully expect PP is monitoring the situation, but there's no point in getting any old keeper just for the sake of it. It's that type of recruitment policy that got us in trouble.
I actually thought we defended magnificently in the first half. We dealt witb everything they put into the box. Maybe it's a concentration thing, to a man we were dreadful second half. I thought Leather was fabulous marshalling their back line, I do miss him.
The players need to be encouraged to shoot on sight; we seemed to be doing this more often in the first half when their goalkeeper was struggling with the wet surface, and we obviously got our goal from it. When JJ was through in the second half, he wasn't in too dissimilar a position to Wilson when he scored their second. Guess what - he put his lace through it. Their goalkeeper didn't look much better than ours.
We definitely need some better options off the bench, however considering how little we've seen of two of pur best players last season (Poole and Harrison) we're not doing too bad. We badly missed Poole's ball retention yesterday, nobody does it even remotely as well as him, and that's the difference at this level.
I wasn't too impressed with shouts of 'murderer' at Meppen-Walters. The lad might deserve some stick, but I'd like to think we're better than that (I appreciate some will disagree).