After the 1-0 defeat to an admittedly excellent Bolton team, Johnnie was slightly hyperbolic in his assessments but that's OK, he's supposed to keep everyone's pecker up. Sure saying it was a game of two halves was stretching it a bit (aside from the obvious fact that it literally always is), as was saying we dominated the second half. We didn't actually have any shots on target during that period, but while "dominated" might be a bit OTT, it WAS the best we've played for months in my opinion.
How did it happen and why did it happen? Well firstly there was a shrewd half time switch of James Tilley by the manager. I thought our tail between his legs returnee was comfortably our best player on the day, and it made perfect sense to put him up against their most dangerous attacker.
The management team deserve lots of credit for that decision. It was a huge call, and while it's nice that numpties like me applaud it in hindsight, we'd have been the first to call it "Madness" if it had gone wrong. And James Tilley deserves huge credit too. He slightly went down in my estimation when he told some of our younger fans to Fuck Off, but there is no doubt that he is a quality footballer. God only knows how he couldn't get a game at Wycombe.
Another big call was the introduction of Junior NKeng at half-time. It's obvious when you watch this kid that he is way off the finished article and has a huge amount to learn. BUT, he is a classic example of the "Let's talk about what he CAN do rather than what he can't". The excellent Plough Lane by numbers posted up that we had 10 successful dribbles in the whole match, eight of which were this kid in the second half. Now when you are talking "impact" you can't get much better than that, and I counted FOUR free kicks he won on the edge of their box. The obvious caveat with this kid is that if you sneak him into the team at wingback, now teams are getting to know about him they'll target his side, push him back and ask him to defend. The best way to deal with natural dribblers like Junior NKeng is to keep him in his own half, sooner or later we'll be forced into playing him left midfield or not at all.
More important than all of those changes though was the fact that in the second half we changed the way we were playing. I'd summarise it in saying we introduced energy, high press and tempo into our game. Instantly the game became more chaotic and I've long been 100% convinced that we are a far better team under those circumstances. Of course when you press high you carry the result of being played through or over. You are far less compact, your shape can get pulled all over the place and you are by definition more vulnerable. That said, you by definition become more uncomfortable to play against, opposition players have less time and you have the opportunity to nick the ball high up. Players far better than the ones we run into in league two don't like being pressed, and we did it excellently.
Tempo is another thing. I've long said that if we ARE going to continuosly launch it (and let's face it, we are) then can't we just get on and do it already? There's no need to fart around rolling it sideways for two minutes before we hit it long, if we're going to do it then get on with it. Similarly if we get a throw in, a corner, a free kick or a goal kick, GET ON WITH IT! There is no gain for us in slowing the game down, in the second half we did it far less and looked better for it.
So no it didn't get us a result nor a shot on target, but Omar really ought to have scored and Steve Seddon very nearly did. The difference against a team who frankly could have been out of sight in the first half was significant.
So for me I hope we've learnt something. The answer if you can't score a goal is not to assume you're not going to score one & defend like crazy for a 0-0. No, the answer is to gamble, to take a risk, to apply all of your efforts into scoring. I think we need to press high, from minute one. To do that though you need players with energy who can get about the pitch. Those that can't need to sit down for a while. N'Keng obviously needs to start and we obviously need to get the ball to him whenever we can. We oughtn't either to over complicate what we're asking him to do, "Get it and go at em" would do the trick. He is the first player since Ayoub Assal to get the fans off their seats.
In short we need to gamble, to push all in. We are losing every week playing conservatively, we can't do any worse if we go for it.
