It feels like our start to the season has set unrealistic expectations of this team. It's always been a work in progress - at our best we're absolutely capable of making the play-offs, but it's easy to get dizzy about a team in those optimistic late summer days when the sun shines, the pitches are perfect, and all the players are fresh. We've always lacked the real depth to guarantee a challenge and were always susceptible to hitting a rocky patch if we picked up injuries and suspensions and that's how it's panning out - the winter months were always going to be the real test of our promotion mettle and it feels that now we're seeing a realistic portrayal of the team's ceiling, as it stands.
The polar opposites of how we ended last season and started this season made it easy to park KR's shambolic kamikaze job as a distant memory, but the embers of his friendly arson job are still floating around the squad and Manning didn't fan them all out - most rational fans said it would take at least 2 windows to sort this squad into something resembling a promotion contender and that hasn't changed.
There was certainly no lack of effort tonight. It's absolutely crazy to see people trying to write Des off when he's only just arrived and hasn't really had his best team available to him. It's also not his team, and he's come in at a time when performances were just starting to slip as the squad was stretched... We're still in a good position and let's wait and see what he's got up in his sleeve in January. I'm sure the first few games have left him under no illusions about where we need to improve and he deserves to at least be allowed one window to give people an idea of how he wants to shape his team at least!
Finally, kudos to Josh Murphy - delighted to see him start showing the talent we all thought we were getting. Really impressed with not just how sharp he looked but how hard he worked - with a confident striker on the end of his work it may have been a different result.
