Yeah, it was clearly a penalty but the ref was in the wrong place to see it. That said, it was one of those games where you had a sense we could go up an extra gear if needed. By the end we’d made a good league two side look a level below us. Gills fans on the train back to Manchester were both generous and philosophical in defeat, understanding they’d been outplayed from start to end and it won’t happen too often. The less said about the four inside the ground who attacked an older Wrexham fan the better. First time I’ve seen real violence in the ground for a good while. Also saw issues at General.
My first home league game since the start of September thanks to ill health and it was good to be back although I probably took too much on for the day and public transport added to the stress considerably. I made the Chester to Wrexham train with 15 seconds to spare thanks to delays at Manchester Victoria. A fellow fan and cancer survivor couldn’t run and got the later 2:20 train. A massive crash on the A55 saw lots of people delayed. That includes my cousin who was delayed by 1 hour 40 and getting in 10 minutes after the first goal. Fortunately the second was a classic.
Good to see the brass band doing Wrexham Is The Name; an immaculately observed minutes silence (we have to be right up there in doing that) but the fly over was hilarious. Everyone heard the noise. No-one saw a plane. When they introduced the pilots at half time we booed them.
I can’t understand why The Mighty Whites can’t find a spot for Sam Greenwood
He’s doing very well at Boro, and has managed overcome any Smoggies’ prejudice against Makems, and though it’s all very well sending him out on loan for some game time, to have agreed to a purchase clause, rumoured to be 1.5 million, is just plain bonkers.
His dead ball skills may well come back to bite us in the backside at some future date.
His popularity grows game by game Dave. Four goals in his last six games is a promising return, plus I am not sure we have found his best position within the team yet. He is being played on the left due to injuries and can often go missing for periods of the game. Many feel he could be more productive in a central role. We shall see. No matter, he keeps popping up with important goals and at the moment 1.5 million looks a bit of a bargain. Plus I see he has earned a call up to the Under 21’s, so he’s obviously doing something right. Cracking free kick, wasn’t it?
It certainly was, and the baffling thing is that he was already doing that with Leeds in the youth teams.
Similarly, he’d shown signs that he is best suited to a central position up front, rather than being isolated out wide.
There’s a fair few of us wondering why he couldn’t be fitted into the squad here, and why the person making those decisions decided to just write him off, especially at that giveaway figure.
Leeds just getting it so wrong again in their transfer strategy.
Good win for Crewe against Derby in the FA Cup last night. Having now seen all the teams at the top pf L2 I think Crewe are marginally the best. Good as Stockport undoubtedly are (and that wasn’t why they beat us) I suspect they’ve gone too early. They’re likely top three but possibly not champions. If Crewe finish below them it will only be for lack of resources.
The Notts County high line, which I couldn’t quite believe was so simplistic when we beat them 3-2 last season, appears to have been increasingly sussed out and it wouldn’t be a surprise if Williams bottled their current injury crisis and walked out to Oxford United. Unbeaten though Mansfield are that’s largely because they’re hard to beat rather than them being so good they’re battering people. That said, Keillor-Dunn is definitely the one who got away and it’s good to see an ex Wrexham player doing so well.
We’ll test Accrington’s and our own aspirations on Saturday but it’s good to see Wild doing so well at Barrow. Sooner or later a club with money will gamble on him and might just be richly rewarded.
Ain’t that the way though, Dave! There probably isn’t a side in the league where fans couldn’t put their own player in for your ‘he’. The hard truth is that we will never know how the decisions are made because clubs are private businesses. We are forever outsiders.
Well on the plus side it was lovely to have a lift there and back and get home in time for a nice warming chilli. I also tested new goggles and whilst they don’t have the magnification of my monocular they were something of a revelation until it started raining. No-one wants to keep wiping four lenses. Nothing else positive about that game whatsoever. Accrington raised their prices to cover policing sufficiently stupid enough to create problems rather than solve them. We then find ourselves in a ground without hog drinks; stewards who stand in front of people in wheelchairs and so on. That said, our crowd did not cover themselves in glory.
On the pitch Parky picked a team designed to cover the loss of two right wing backs on international duty. It didn’t go well. Main issues were that we
wanted too long on the ball in a game where we were never going to get that.
picked a team with no ball winning defensive midfielder. It would be generous to say we didn’t get to a single second ball all afternoon.
despite having no ball winners we got ourselves involved in endless games of head tennis. Awful stuff. Had we simply displayed some intelligence we’d have kept the ball low and played some football in what became dreadful conditions.
It appears that seven layers, yes seven, a snood, gloves and two goodies are not sufficient to keep you warm in Accrington. May not have done my residual pneumonia much good.
To be honest yes. Yelling at eleven grown men is massively therapeutic regardless of the outcome. Nice car journey there and back with my cousin. Lots of territory covered. Good to go back to Accrington and see how things have developed since my last visit on a contrastingly sunny day pre season two decades or so ago. Seen little football recently cos of ill health so the fact we agreed it was the worst game we’d seen in just over 20 years is ultimately neither here nor there. If you go to football just for winning then you’re missing 90% of the actual experience.
Like the people on the other thread who think it’s normal to listen to music alone in the equivalent of an anechoic chamber.
Poor finishing. Nothing really happening in midfield. Lack of intensity. In short, Stoke again. We need a proper 10 to unlock 10 men defences. All in all a tepid performance. Fair play to Rotherham.
Leeds had won 7 of 8 I thought? A draw in a Yorkshire derby isn’t awful especially as Rotherham have a decent squad despite results. I remember watching Leeds as a student in the 80s when a certain manager explained that the reason they struggled to get promoted was that they were in a division which gave them “too many Yorkshire derbies”. An argument undone by several other Yorkshire clubs at the time.
The Mighty Whites have no one but themselves to blame in failing to pick up all three points last night.
Going ahead through Summerville in the sixth minute, they seemed to go into “cruise control”.
It was almost as if the thinking was, “plenty of time to score more goals, as we’re much better than these”, as they spurned chance after chance, and it was only a matter of time before Rotherham equalised.
We need to learn that with a one goal lead, we can’t afford to sit back and admire our superiority over the lower teams, and need to keep our foot on the gas to score further goals to make the game safe, which pretty much sums up Farke’s post match comments.
During Leeds’ steady climb up the league in recent weeks, I’ve been so focused on closing the points gap between us and the top two, that I’ve been completely ignoring the results of those teams immediately below us in the play-off places, and the penny has dropped that a Saints win today against Udders will see them move above us.
Maybe some of the Leeds players might waken up this morning and come to a similar realisation.
I feared as much with players coming back from two international games, the usual sharpness just wasn’t there. Farke summed it up very well and will keep them on their toes, it’s a learning curve for us. Another game on Wednesday, just hope they are better but at least we have players coming back.
Having said that, what a slick outfit we have become (shades of Marcello’s first season), surely one of the best teams in the league. I didn’t see that coming at the beginning of the season when we were losing all our players.
I also wasn’t expecting the transformation which has very quickly taken place at Elland Road, though I was only too happy to see the back of several of the players brought in the previous season.
Their replacements have been a cut above, whilst the likes of Rutter and Summerville are playing so much better this year under Farke.
It’s all good … … … well, apart from last night, obviously.
