Who'd be a football manager?

Who'd be a football manager? In what other job are you told that if you provide such & such then everyone will be happy, only to discover that when you ARE providing exactly what everyone was going to be happy about, someone moves the goalposts?

And so it is with Johnnie Jackson. "Give us a mid table position and a solid team" they said. Then, when he is in the process of giving us exactly that, they say the football is a hard watch. They wonder if we could go for it more, if the ever racking up draws column is the result of perhaps a too conservative approach. They worry that our goals have dried up, that a potential tilt at comfortable top seven might be in the process of turning into a "we need to win our last seven to have a chance of the playoffs". How fickle is the football fan? How ungrateful.

People unfortunate enough to be frequent readers of this blog (and you really ought to do something more productive with your spare time) will know of course by now that by "they", I actually mean "I". I was the personification of the "mid table will do me/I don't care if we play boring football" supporter. After last seasons post Christmas calamaties, any sort of stable points gathering appeared desirable.

That was before though I'd seen the manager build a defence as solid as any in the league. Before I'd seen us cut loose and rip Tranmere apart, do the same at Sutton once we'd got the goal, ditto Colchester. It was before I'd seen it demonstrated every week what a good player Jake Reeves is, before I'd seen Alex Bass, Ryan Johnson, Joe Lewis. See this is the thing, now that I've seen those players, that team we have, I do wonder if we are entirely doing our talents justice.

Take Saturday at Barrow. It wasn't the worst game of football I've ever seen, but it WAS the second worst, (the worst was the Gillingham away 0-0 of a couple of years back, I never want to surpass that). The two games were very similar in many ways. Both played on a potato field of a pitch, a bit of rain, a bit of wind, very few chances and both teams displaying an obvious fear of getting beat. The main difference is that the draw at Gillingham as good as condemned them to the drop and gave us a great chance of staying up (one which we unfortunately didn't take as it turned out). In many respects it was a great point, ugly but vital. My contention is the Barrow one was slightly less so, not in the overall scheme of things.

So to the league this season. I've long said that League Two is an "all about the wins" league. A quick look at it this morning shows that Stockport have won nine games, the most in the league. They are top, and it's little surprise to see that the team who have won the second most (Notts County who have won eight), are second. Interestingly, both teams have lost more games than us. Indeed Notts County have been absolutely smashed up twice (5-1 and 4-1) but they still are second. Mansfield are unbeaten in 13 games which is no mean feat, have no doubt gotten many "great points" and numerous "great clean sheets", but are sixth. This league is all about the wins, it pays to go for it, risk all for the win.

And so to us. Yes we have a brilliant defence and the coaching staff deserve huge credit for that. We also though have a central midfield partnership that has scored one goal in our first fourteen matches, a left side/winger slot which has yielded one. We have as one of our strikers the excellent Omar Bugiel who has never been a regular scorer throughout his career, alongside the best striker in the league who we aren't creating for. We don't score via our centre halves from set pieces, and the full backs have one goal between them so far. It isn't difficult to see why our goals drying up has coincided with James Tilley not scoring every single week, and in all honesty we don't look like a team who is about to turn the taps on anytime soon. We are a really good team within which everyone works their nads off, hard to beat, we put a shift in etc etc, but flowing we ain't.

But we CAN do it, we CAN play expansive, expressive, brave football. I know we CAN, because I've seen it. The shame is that we've only really opened up once the game is safe, once we don't have to worry about being beat any longer.

And that's the crux of the whole thing for me. We oughtn't in my view be sooo worried about losing the odd match. We are definitely not going to go down, there is only upside to our league season. We aren't going to fail in our ambition because we were too brave and lost too often, but being too safe and drawing too many might well hold us back.

At the moment we are shooting for the middle of the green, trying to save par, make the cut. It's time to get the big dog out and try to carry the water, time to go for the pin. Fortune in this league favours the brave, it's time to don the Warpaint and go a bit more Braveheart. COYD