The View From Churchmans

Excellent performances from Tarricco, Clapham, Holland, Dyer and in
patches Petta. Dreadful performances from Naylor and Stockwell.
Indeed, Micky was so bad that I can only assume he was unwell. It was
definitely out of character for him to just watch the ball passing him by
so much. I can understand people saying that they’d rather Kieron was
playing elsewhere, but he was clearly having to cover for Stockwell. How
many times did we see Tarricco and Dyer linking up down the wing,
especially in the second half? In every case, Stockwell was nowhere to be
seen – but that position is his, not Kieron’s. Players like Stockwell who
seem to defy the odds and go on long past their sell-by date often
eventually lose it overnight, rather than gradually, but I’m sure from
his running in the Grimsby game that this isn’t the case yet with Micky.
He must have been unwell. I hope.
Once again, our main weakness was apparent (as a few teams, most notably
Tranmere, proved last year) – we don’t have a sound tactic for beating a
team which drops right back and lets us come at them without a fight in
midfield. Several times Venus was allowed to bring the ball forward
almost unchallenged from our area right into their half, but every time
(and Bury knew it) he then had no idea what to do, and nobody was really
making the openings for him. So hats off to Bury for doing their
homework. You could see from the way our midfield was playing that had
Bury come at us even slightly we would have got behind them and taken
them to pieces (and I’m not accusing them of being particularly negative,
they left a player or two up at all times). But too often the lack of
ideas meant that the ball went up in the air, and that’s not us at the
best of times, never mind without Scowcroft.
Johnson’s close control was awful, and with Bury not allowing us to play
through balls to him, passes to his feet were all he got all afternoon.
So he seemed to have an even worse game than he probably really did. Alex
looked good for 20 minutes, but then was clearly running out of steam. I
hope he’s not having the same problems as he did in the close season last
year.
Nice to see Richard at last getting the confidence to command his defence
verbally.
Bobby’s finally turned into a classic left winger: brilliant for a
quarter of the game, invisible the rest of the time. No point in
complaining, that’s what the most skilful wingers do, and always have
done.
Clapham’s and Tarricco’s encouraging performances were probably
exaggerated by Bury’s “come and get us” tactics. I doubt if they’ll often
get that much opportunity to stretch their legs. But great to see how
well they both took the chance.
Overall, we might be one of only two teams which hasn’t scored yet, but
two more unbeaten league games to add to our astonishing 1998 gives us
plenty of cause for optimism. And the fact that the supposedly weakest
part of our team, the defence, hasn’t conceded a goal either, is even
better news. It’s just a real pain about the scum.
Some ratings: Wright 7 Clapham 8 Venus 6 Mowbray 6 Tarricco 8 Petta 7
Holland 8 Dyer 8 Stockwell 4 Naylor 4 Johnson 5 Mathie 5.