On my usual very early-morning three-mile trot around the town whose name I dare not say, I tried to figure out how to write this without sounding as downbeat as I felt after that tepid 1-1 draw with Exeter
City. I failed, of course. The same conclusions kept circling back like pigeons to a half-eaten bag of chips.
In short, this team seems utterly incapable of learning from their mistakes. They can’t string together anything resembling a creative sequence, and when it comes to mental fortitude – well, let’s just say it’s missing in action, last seen wandering somewhere between midfield and the dugout.
Believe me, I went looking for positives, but they were outnumbered. Chief among them: a better side would have comfortably beaten us, despite our fortuitous opener from the lava-hot Jack Marriott.
Marriott’s scoring for fun, bless him, but even he contrived to miss an absolute sitter in the second half. There’s always a yin to the yang with us – usually in the same five minutes of play. Just once, it’d be nice to watch a game where we look vaguely competent from start to finish. Nobody’s expecting perfection, but is “get ahead, stay ahead, look confident doing so” really such an extravagant ask?
From Ashqar Ahmed’s ongoing war with the laws of throw-ins to the “first down” style of hoof-and-hope progression, it’s simply not professional enough. Nor is it sustainable that Marriott carries the burden of scoring all the goals like some latter-day Sisyphus in football boots.
Our general play, meanwhile, is as scattered and aimless as a rusty shotgun. There’s no pattern, no incision, no intent. Everything is either a yard short, a yard long or a thought too late. It’s all very… floppy.
We’ve seen this kind of malaise before – under both Paul Ince and Rubén Sellés. The half-hearted passes, the overhit ones, the blind panic disguised as urgency. It’s like the entire side’s forgotten how to calibrate their own limbs and minds into just doing the right thing, even if it’s just occasionally.
Yes, they’re League One footballers. But they’re also paid professionals, not raffle winners, and the bare minimum shouldn’t be asking too much. Watching us descend into pinball football every week genuinely baffles me. Well – more “exhausts” than baffles at this point.
The man in the dugout
So, what’s it all down to? Coaching.
And here, my own tactical expertise (gleaned from decades of shouting and writing at clouds, granted) reaches its limits. I don’t know what they’re told to do in training – though I imagine it involves a lot of cones and very little consequence.
What I do know is that they’re not playing anywhere near what they’re capable of. Whoever is holding that metaphorical penny, it ain’t dropping.
Football, when it’s good, is poetry in motion. When it’s bad, it’s us: clunky and clueless. We’re meant to be a symphony of moving parts, but right now we’ve just got a super soprano and a band with badly tuned instruments.
As for Hunt – the conductor of this curious orchestra – his post-match musings are becoming acerbic to the ear. He sounds apologetic and meek, and keeps on saying we just need to keep doing the same things better and to work harder. Hardly inspirational stuff.
He admits the defending has been naïve. Admissions are fine. But what’s he doing about it? Too many goals are similar slapstick farces – a botched clearance, a flick off someone’s heel, and suddenly the ball’s in the onion bag. It’s less “bad luck” and more “carelessness dressed as calamity”.
Going forward, we somehow look even emptier. Players such as Paddy Lane and, in yesterday’s case, Matt Ritchie, appear completely divorced from the play – as if they’ve taken out separate restraining orders against the ball.
And then there’s poor Kamari Doyle – practically invisible to his own teammates, despite being picked to play in the very area we’re most desperate to use. It almost feels deliberate at this point.
Hunt can’t seem to work out how Lewis Wing and Charlie Savage are meant to involve the wide players or Doyle. Doyle can’t play the ball to Marriott because, well, he never gets the ball (or, for the one time Marriott was available, he never used him!) It’s like trying to pass the parcel when nobody remembered to bring the parcel.
Those moving parts that could, in theory, form something coherent, still look like strangers who met in the pub car park 10 minutes before kick-off and agreed to “just have a go”.
That’s on coaching – or the lack thereof. We can’t keep relying on luck or the regular moments of Marriott miracles and passing them off as “good results”. There simply has to be more to us than that.
Right now, there isn’t. And every week it looks a little less likely that’s going to change and could easily get worse.
