Sometimes you get out of bed and on the way to the carsey you tread on an earring your daughter has left on the bathroom floor. You howl in agony and as you try to hop and grab the punctured foot at the same time, you trip over the cat and fall in the bath. Inevitably you grab at a shelf on the way down. Equally predictably it's not designed to hold you up and you rip it off the wall, sending it's contents spiralling to the tiles. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong, sometimes in life it happens.
Course, you could stomp up the stairs and have a go at the daughter for not being more careful, you could if you can catch it kick the cat, you could use thicker wall plugs when putting shelves up. The reality is though that none of these things will help, sometimes you just gotta accept that it wasn't your day.
So you know where I'm going with this. As a football club, be it the fanbase, the management team or the players, knowing what to do when you have one of "those" days is vital. I'll tell you what you do, nothing. You don't panic. You don't conclude that the players "don't care", that they "don't get it" or that the manager is a mug. You analyse, you study, you improve, and next time you come up against the same opponent you do better.
So emotion aside for a second, here are my thoughts. The players DO care (of course they do FFS), so do the management team. I would argue that in this particular fixture they care way too much. We allow ourselves as a club to let our obvious desire to win the game cloud our judgement as to how to best achieve that outcome. We do it every time, hopefully this is the last one. MK are a decent team with some good players, but anywhere near our best we would see them off in my opinion more often than not. In order to do that though we have to calm down, be way more clinical.
The way MK play these days under Mike Williamson makes even the Liam Manning version look like a route one team. Next time, we are going to have to press the football much more effectively. We need to be braver, you can't press in ones and twos. We were nowhere near so effective here as we were against Notts County, in their desire to get stuck in our players were either freezing or being too reckless and going alone.
I can't think of a better example of us wanting it too much than James Tilleys miss on the stroke of half time. He scores that and it's a different game, he thinks that only he knows how he missed it. He's wrong, I know how he missed it too. He tried too hard to make sure, rather than just larraping it into the net like he normally would.
We've got to defend much better. Hus Biler was as bad as I've ever seen him and was a shoo in red card. I'm not giving up on the kid after one poor game, no way. Jack Currie has been much better than he was tonight, and while PK can count himself a tad unlucky he did get wrong side for his red card. Ryan Johnson was as hesitant as he was unlucky for the second goal, only the goalkeeper and Joe Lewis were anywhere near it on the day.
Up top Aaron Sasu continues to shimmer like a speck of gold in the middle of a babbling brook, while new signing John Kymani-Gordon had a fine debut. The rest of the lads will know that they have played better. No doubt the management team have coached and set up better too, but NONE of them failed for lack of effort. It's not time for recriminations, it's time for support. We lick our wounds, we take it on the chin, and we make sure that the next time we do much better.
I think we will. COYD.
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