December

Having the two main centre halves out against a free scoring team didn’t help

 

"pivotal to our chances of escalating relegation in the new year"- very funny @Park bantam , very funny.

 

To be fair to Hopkin he had NKP and O'Connor unavailable. So the defence was a horrendous sticking plaster job consisting of two fullbacks playing as CBs (one rushed back quickly from injury) and McGowan, who has been crap all season and therefore relegated to the bench. This against a side that scores for fun at home. This isn't really representative of recent defensive performances, which had noticeably cut out the silly individual errors.
The previous two games, against Posh and Oxford, the defence played pretty well, conceding only one goal, which was almost certainly offside. The pairing of O'Connor and KP was starting to look half decent.
No one's pretending we are great at the back, but the recent trend has been towards improvement. We'll have O'Connor back next game and will have to hope that McGowan isn't too big a banana skin.

 

Walsall was the big one IMO. Set us up nicely for the Scunny game which meant we go to Sunderland and not be overwhelmed or nervous.

Yesterday was clearly the pick of the results and performance of the bunch. That said, coming away from Sunderland feeling disappointed we didn’t get a point must have given the lads a boost ahead of Rochdale.

 

I was at the Walsall, Scunny and Rochdale games. Came away from all three saying we wouldn't have been flattered to win 6-0.
It's an astonishing turnaround. We're certainly not out of the woods yet, but if we keep playing as we have been recently we'll be fine.