Plymouth @ Home 16th February

Looking at teams down there with us are we going to need this 52 points people keep mentioning?

Everyone in the bottom 6 is in woeful form and how are we all going to get to 50? Could it be one of the lowest needed to stay up?

I think 50 will do it

 

They are gung ho aren’t they? Sounded like it was a thriller at their place. That might just help us if they don’t sit everyone behind the ball and play a game of bastardry, ala Fleetwood,

 

5-0 argyle

 

I hope that you're right, because I despair now of us reaching my preferred 55... We are so up-and-down, that from thinking we could be comfortably safe, I now wonder if we should be hoping for a repeat of that miraculous season when 44 points was enough.

RCB

 

I don’t think we will get 55 either. Maybe just over 50

 

Yes -- if we could keep to the pace of our last 10, we'd get to 51-52, which may well be enough.

RCB

 

O'Donnell

Caddis P.O'Connor NKP Wood

O'Brien Akpan

Ball Payne Clarke

Doyle

A.Connor, Wilson, Chicksen, Anderson, Butterfield, Devine, Colville.

 

Given how tight it is at the bottom I agree this year it could well be a lower total needed. Let’s hope so.

NKP has run out of chances now. I’d bin him off, bring Paudie straight in at CB. Drop Miller from the squad to ensure we’re within the loan allowance, then play Butterfield, Ball, Payne and O’Brien again.

Doyle straight in upfront. Several times on Sat we worked the ball wide but when we cut it back there was no one in the danger areas. Doyle gets into those areas and has a better instinct than Miller.

 

I’m no fan of Miller, in fact anyone who has read and remembers my thoughts on him will know I think he’s garbage. But one flaw with your plan is that we only have 2 strikers, so if Miller is out of the squad we just have Doyle, yes Billy can play there but he isn’t a striker in my eyes and probably many others.

Just goes to show how crap and unbalanced our squad actually is, when we have to include a poor young loanee or leave ourselves with no options.

 

Think Ball prefers to play up front? Might be worth a try.

 

Plymouth as a rule play in a,similar way to Fleetwood so unless we change tactics I fear the result might be similar

 

It will be the lad Ladapo ( or whatever his name is) that will do the damage. Keep him out of it and we stand a chance. Ignore him at our peril.

 

Think he played there for Fleetwood, now we have even more midfielders it might be worth a try. Only trouble is he’s better out wide than Clarke and Butterfield I would guess, and we’re already painfully short out wide.

 

As Obrien says in today’s T&A we need to find away to beat the spoiling tactics we have no big man up front so we have to stretch it by playing people out wide.

 

Don't worry. Keefly has a habbit of this. I am to a miserable person...

 

We are, and Scannell is good but unreliable injury wise. What is this new lad Anderson preferred position? Also Connor Wood ain’t bad in that position, either way I want two upfront. It is just daft in my view to have a wealth of attacking players and only play one up front. Anyway I have just had a word with DH, and I am picking the team on Saturday

 

He’s another deep midfielder I think. The trouble is we have plenty of attacking midfielders but only 2 actual strikers. Good look to Hopkin because I’m opinionated and like to think I would do something different and it’d work, but I’m out of answers with this lot. I’ve read people’s ideas on here as well and think no chance. It’s really not as simple as telling the team to go out and pass the ball on the floor and we’ll win it’s not a game of FIFA. This team look out of ideas and quite frankly I am. We had a purple spell in December, but teams have found out that if they press us and crowd Payne and O’Brien out we’re hopeless. That’s the big difference between then and now, not that we’ve changed that others have studied us and worked out how to easily stop us. Sandy due to lack of depth I don’t see how that’ll change.

 

Glad you are picking the team may just have persuaded me to attend
Jury is well and truly out on Scannell but he is good for morale in the treatment room
which incidentally is the busiest room in the building

 

A tad pessimistic, but I am of the school of thought, don’t come to me with your problems bring me solutions! Well I think we need to start thinking outside of the box, surely it is not beyond our management team to come up with a strategy that would counteract the 10 men behind the ball tactic, or how we counteract Payne and Ball being smothered?