Jack Shepherd

I can’t believe you’re blaming Byrne for the Cheltenham goal or indeed the Gillingham or Newport goal. You are just biased and as your going to nit pick every game Byrne has or indeed Baldwin when he returns instead of Diabate it’s really time to end this debate..

 

Non of our centre halves are world beaters, they are all adequate.
Unfortunately the three picked on Saturday, all had a brain fart at the same time, which cost us the game.
They learnt nothing from the first half , where Doncaster broke at speed on us and we were lucky not to concede.
I also include the manager in this, who did nothing to counter this, all after changing the team to bring in Benn, who was still clearly suffering from the bug and Wright,who is just awful.
Smith also brought nothing to the table and Jamie Walker had one of his poorer days.

 

Byrne has done better than I expected tbh, but he is very susceptible to teams with pace like on Saturday. Personally I don't think our defence is anywhere near good enough for promotion, excluding Shepherd who I rate highly. Platt was far superior to anything we brought in and is earning rave reviews in a team currently sat above us who I think will also end comfortably above us sadly.

 

Pretty much my thoughts and the problem is that neither Kelly, Baldwin or the free agent who's name I can't remember will improve us enough.

For what it's worth though I do feel like the back three are sometimes hung out to dry by extremely attacking wing backs who sometimes neglect going the other way with the same desire and by the fact that we only have Smallwood to protect them and he simply can't cover the grass quick enough when we're countered.

 

Smith did nothing wrong and he held it up well and dropped deep to collect the ball. Guessing he did as was told.

I'd rather have Smith than Kav

 

I'm not against Smith getting a run instead of Kav but for me they both offer very little attacking threat and I think we've already seen that Sanderson is better than both of them.

 

From what I saw, Smith didn’t do nearly enough to counter the loss of Kav’s pressing ability. And do we really want our second striker dropping behind our creative midfielders to receive the ball?

I know it’s pathetic playing a striker just because he runs around a lot but unfortunately that’s where we are. If it’s a choice between two chronically non scoring strikers, as it appears to be, I’d rather we play the one that puts effective pressure on L2 defenders and forces mistakes.

Our pressing against Doncaster was pathetic compared to recent weeks, which seriously affected our attacking threat. And that’s down to Smith being slower and less focused in the press.

Also, Kav links well with Pointon, as we saw in the second half at Cheltenham. For some reason that combination, which worked well at the end of last season, has not been allowed to regularly continue this season, which is puzzling.

 

The only striker , other than Cook, who looked like he knows where the net is is Sanderson, but after a bright start he appears to have fallen out of favour . Oliver Kav and Smith have all looked poor this season and in Oliver's case , since the day he got that stupid three year contract.