We found a team even worse than us! (Dons 2 Daggers 1)

Some match reports contain dull things. Like facts. Fortunately, because I don’t take notes during a game (though that might have relieved the simultaneous boredom and tension of having to watch this god-awful excuse for a football match) and because I’m writing this 2 days after the game, raw facts are few and far between. Besides, if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on, there’s the OS report or the brief highlights and report on the BBC website from where you can find out that we had more of the possession, but they had more shots on and off target, and more corners. At which point there’s probably room for a cliché about “the only stat that counts” being 2-1 in our favour. 

 

But, enough facts, and time for some opinion. As you may have already gathered, I wouldn’t put this game forward as a great advert for the beautiful game. It was tense, nervous, and scrappy. So I suppose there’s another cliché to roll out, which Terry Brown duly did in his post match interview: “it didn't matter about the performance, didn't matter about anything other than gaining our first three home points for a matter of time”.

So, given that we have three points to celebrate, I won’t dwell too much on how this performance was easily as poor as those against Herford and Plymouth, and how although players didn’t do too badly individually, they really didn’t look like a team, for which TB’s selection must take a lot of the blame. I’ve previously posted on how Jolley and Harrison don’t seem able to play together (see Team for Daggers ), and whether you call Saturday’s formation a 4-4-2 or 4-3-3, it didn’t look remotely cohesive.

Instead, I’ll concentrate on the positives, which are:

1. Everyone rolled their sleeves up and got stuck in, with Billy Knott and Sammy Moore putting in a hell of a shift in the centre of midfield. The effort, and enthusiasm for a challenge really couldn’t be faulted. Which leads to...
2. Judging by the way the players went to the bench to celebrate the goals, TB certainly hasn’t "lost the dressing room"
3. Jack Midson – another tireless effort, lots of intelligent movement, and a cracking left foot finish for his 18^th goal of the season. Other teams might get more chances than us, but with a quality finisher like Jack in the team, we’ve always got a chance.
4. Sam Hatton – best I’ve seen him play for a long time, and just shaded Midson for my man of the match.
5. Kieran Djilali – let’s hope his return can give us a bit more creativity so that that Midson chap doesn’t have to continue feeding off scraps for the rest of the season.
6. Pim Balkestein looks a quality defender. He and MMK (if they can last more than 45 minutes together) should make one of the better centre-half pairings in league 2. All we need now is a similar quality central midfielder...
7. Three points! 9 points clear of the relegation places.
8. And last but not least, the fans. From my viewpoint in the KRE, I couldn’t detect anything other than whole-hearted support from another big crowd. By now, Blackburn fans would have run out of paint and sheets with all the banners they’d have made calling for the manager, the board, the kit man, uncle Tom Cobley and all to be sacked if they were in our position. So give yourselves a pat on the back.

I think that pretty much covers it, but I’ll throw in some player ratings just to pad this out even further:

Brown:  Keeping 8 Distribution 4. If only we could somehow transplant Jack Turner’s distribution skills onto Seb, we’d make a fortune when we sold him in the summer.

Hatton: 8

Gwillim: 7.

MMK: 6

Balkestein: 7

Toks: 5. Not his best game this season. Strangely, for such a left footed player, he seems more comfortable playing on the right.

Knott: 7.

Sammy Moore: 7

Jolley: 6. Looked more threatening when moved up to partner Midson, and may well be just one goal away from the confidence that will get him back to his early season form

Midson: 8

Harrison: 5. Not sure what the problem is here. Let’s hope it’s not that we’ve bought a pup.

Subs: Johnson 6 (did OK without looking quite up to the pace of League 2); Djilali 7 (6 for playing OK, plus one for scoring the winning goal, even if their keeper should have saved it)

And that's about it, except to say that having seen this game, and tried some team selection myself in my aforementioned Team for Daggers post, it's not central defenders that we need, it's central midfielders. No really, how many genuine central midfielders have we got? Sammy Moore, er, Ricky Wellard? Maybe loanees Knott and Moncur can play there, as Knotty did to some effect on Saturday, but I don't see them as genuine central midfielders. But maybe that's for another post, as this one feels like it's been going on for long enough.
Next up, Bradford. Which will probably be dire as well, but that probably won't stop me easing myself out of my armchair (which currently resides on Hayling Island during the week) and up the A3 to witness another League 2 relegation 6-pointer in all its glory. Come on you Dons!