The Voice - Match preview #39: Accrington Stanley vs Bradford City Saturday 29th March 2025 12:30pm

Of course, it was a poor performance .

 

What you say Broncs is how I'm sure most of us saw it. And, what's more, we saw it pretty early. I'm very loathe to criticise GA because he's got us to where we are now but could he not have anticipated how they might play and certainly seen it pretty early as we all did? If he had he surely would have had an alternative strategy. When Accrington shut down our plan A options all we could do was go long. And that's happened in previous games. We really need a strategy to go to when plan A is negated. I suspect we're not likely to face that again this season as the teams we play have mostly something to play for so the games will be much more open which will suit us. But our opponents will have strategies to negate us and these need to be anticipated and planned for.

 

Personally Dave i thought Alexander got his man management spot on, he gave the lads who had played so well the week before as much time as possible, it would be very harsh to change what was a winning team the week before after just 45 minutes where the team didn't play the conditions.

 

We are all managers on the sidelines, me included, but when a manager has a team in the top two playing the best football for years we're gonna have to go with his judgement.

 

Personally I think the lack of Andy Cook, or that type of player has cost us when we come up against opponents like this
We fail to break them down and revert to lumping it forward to Kav or Mellon, who become ineffective. It’s not their game, although Mellon is better in the air than Kav
It’s Alexander’s weak point for me, there doesn’t seem to be a plan B for when our fast ball players are closed down quickly and not given time to play

 

I don't know if it's been mentioned before but perhaps we should have signed a forward in the window ........

 

You're spot on. Most managers would do the same, and it isn't unusual in football to give the same team 10/15 minutes in the second half to improve, baring in mind it was 0-0 as well not us getting hammered. He will have talked with them at half time, said where we needed to improve and hoped that they would. The players wouldn't be in his squad if he didn't think they were able to put in an improved performance against a team near the bottom.

 

We play better without them. Or summat.

 

It was poor all round on Saturday, so possibly unfair to pick on individual players, but Wright should be nowhere near the starting XI if we have a largely fit squad. He drifts in and out of games too much.

I thought that Accrington executed their game plan really well and made us look toothless. Should probably give credit to them. They’re 20th, still not mathematically safe, and were playing a team that could have gone top. They were never going to be gung ho and it was our job to break them down.

Our run in isn’t exactly great. Thankfully the last game of the season should be a dead rubber for Fleetwood. Would be much better to play teams who are L2 next season whatever happens.

 

I felt the difference was between having our most creative players on the park and not. We didn’t exactly steamroller them 2nd half, but equally I felt we got enough ball in the final third (once Pattison & Pointon came on) to get something had we been in those positions all game.

For me it’s not necessarily that AS ‘forced’ us long, it was they wanted us to do that and we didn’t play the way we should to combat it (which would have required really sharp interchanges in midfield in particular and bring the WBs more into it) i.e. tricky pass into midfield then quick movement of the ball.

Instead, presume our defenders thought long ball was the ‘safer’ option which of course got swallowed up by them as Kav is not Cook. That suggests they don’t trust Khela (as decent as he’s been) or to a degree Smallwood to do that.

Suspect GA was frustrated by the unwillingness to try that play through the middle and then out wide. Obviously at this stage we don’t want to give away cheap goals by giving it away deep in our own half, but for me this was a problem we might have solved by placing more trust in those mids who were on the park.

Either way, hopefully given most of our remaining opponents really need to beat us, we won’t really encounter that approach that ASFC took again this season.

 

As you say Alexander has done well during the time at the club and he's earned the right to pick the team and make changes as and when he likes, as I keep asking would those extra 10/12 minutes have made any difference to the out come if the changes had been made at half time we'll never know, I've tried to find the post match interview where he said he'd thought about changing it at half time but thought he'd give them chance to change things, which they weren't, we move on to Port Vale and hope the likes of Pointon Walker and Pattison are available for a starting place, as I posted I'd start Huntington to take care of Stockley Alexander may have other plans.

 

I've never suggested that mate I was 100% behind his starting 11 they thoroughly deserved their chance to go again, my grip was we were second best to a very poor Accrington side first 45 minutes, we had 2/3 midfield players who have shown in the past they can turn a game around and IMO Alexander should have made those three changes at half time, totally agree were all armchair managers .