Some late night brain farts seeing as I’ve just finished a bunch of incredibly boring work nonsense:
The defence needs fixing. Badly. A reliable and trustworthy defence is essential to any moderately successful team because it allows the players further forward to free themselves. Your defence doesn’t just stop goals going in, it allows you to score more because of how they enable your midfield and attack to play. Moore has played around 25 EFL games and is now the senior centre back, Atkinson was in non-league until a few months ago, Sean Clare has barely played a game at right back in his life and is essentially being turned into one on the job, and Sam Long is a former centre back turned right back who is now being asked to play left back, because our left back who used to be a centre midfielder is injured. Meanwhile our 34 year old player-coach has done himself a mischief, and the manager claims that our teenage central defensive option is apparently so poor that even teams in non-league won’t touch him. That’s a situation we’ve created for ourselves, by signing these players and choosing not to sign others. If it’s rubbish it’s because we made it rubbish.
We barely had any defenders last season either - we had two right backs (until January when we then had one), three centre backs and one left back. Six defenders; five after Christmas. Atkinson joined in January but immediately went out on loan again and was only briefly recalled to sit on the bench for a couple of games. We somehow kept a clean bill of health bar Mousinho getting injured in late Feb, but then the pandemic shut everything down in early March before anything else happened that made it an issue. We then started this season with six defenders once again, only with Sean Clare instead of Chris Cadden and with Rob Atkinson instead of Rob Dickie. Two undeniable downgrades in terms of the here and now - potential is neither guaranteed to be fulfilled nor remotely relevant in the present. And it isn’t hindsight to say this, because concerns were being raised about this many weeks ago, before Dickie had even been sold let alone not been replaced.
Yet we’ve got how many wingers / forwards? About 9? Taylor, Winnall, Agyei, Osei, Asonganyi, Henry, Hall, Cooper, Napa? And apparently the plan is to plough what’s left of the cap into a tenth option, and bring in inexperienced players on loan to prop up the defence, maybe? Is that seriously the plan?
Sometimes you really do need to simply write your first eleven on a piece of paper, then write the name of a second player underneath each of those names who is the “backup” to that position, until you get to 22 players with each position having two names that you feel are at least good enough to play in a match. You would be amazed how many top level clubs work this way - they genuinely build their squad structures with a marker pen. Obviously some positions might be more evenly matched than others, but you get a squad of footballers by doing this. We however seem to cover that part of the team sheet over and treat the defence like it’s some sort of inconvenience, and pretend that only sexy wingers and forwards exist. At some point we are going to have to at least attempt to have a basic and adequate defence, where one injury or a straight red card doesn’t suddenly plunge things into chaos. We’ve been playing with the bare bones at the back for over a calendar year now - probably more than 18 months if you really trace it back - and when you then start reducing the quality while failing to increase the quantity, it’s not going to prove helpful.
Perhaps most importantly, however, we are going to need to get one or two in who are okay / fairly decent players but are strong leaders. Talkers, organisers, communicators and battlers who are up for getting their kit dirty. There’s too much emphasis on, and obsession with, this notion of beautiful technical mavericks being the be all and end all. You need some players in there who can actually have a bloody scrap, and that isn’t anything to do with age. They don’t need to be 30+ and on their last legs, they just need to have hair on their chest and not be afraid to point a few fingers, and ruffle a few feathers. That needs to be allowed to happen - we can’t just keep signing quiet little boys who won’t talk back, while blindly chasing some purist fantasy where only swashbuckling football is allowed, and the players and manager blow kisses to their adoring fans at the final whistle, who in turn throw yellow roses onto the pitch while screaming “forza, forza!” No football team at any level is ever successful without those individuals, right up to the Liverpool’s and Man City’s of the world. You need to have a couple of players who really want it, and who aren’t afraid to pin their own team mates against the wall if they aren’t pulling their weight, let alone go eyeball to eyeball with the opposition.
Yes, the league season is two games old, and we will probably be ‘fine’ by the time we’ve played 46. We could just as easily win the next two games, and that would be ‘fine’ as well. But we haven’t won a proper game inside 90 minutes, bar the tinpot reserve game, since Shrewsbury. We have drawn four (Pompey x2, Wimbledon and Watford in the league cup) and lost three (Wembley, two league games). We can’t start every single season by spluttering through the first 8-10 games and being lucky to average a point per match, and then hoping that when we finally get going the pack hasn’t gotten too far in front. At some point someone has to go, “There is a flaw in the design here, if this happens every season then something is wrong in the way it’s set up at the start.”
There is still time to turn a few dials and sort a few things out, but they do need turning.