This Season (4 Viewers)

Adge said:

Balls! That’s typical.

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Ridiculous as it seems, our fate may yet turn out to be in our own hands come the last match

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Indeed! Walsall and Portsmouth for Peterborough before the last game.
Doncaster away at Oxford on Saturday-Still a long shot really.

Not really a wasted opportunity, but definitely a missed opportunity. For me, missing the playoffs isn't really down to losing to Oxford, drawing with Bristol Rovers or letting the win slip away at the weekend. It's that period between the end of October and the start of February where we struggled. Think we only had about 3 wins in that period. That's where we lost out. We'd have been comfortably in the playoffs if our start of season and end of season form had been maintained throughout.

Still a decent effort overall though.

There's been quite a lot of evolution in team selection this season through injuries, players falling out of favour etc so it is quite hard to analyse the season as a whole. It's only really the back 4 that has remained fairly stable.

The 1st game against Scunthorpe:
Sky Blues Xl: Liam O'Brien (GK), Dujon Sterling, Dom Hyam, Jordan Willis (Thompson, 76), Brandon Mason, Michael Doyle (C), Abu Ogogo, Tom Bayliss (Shipley, 76), Tony Andreu, Jordy Hiwula, Maxime Biamou (Clarke-Harris, 76).

We are back to playing the same system we started with that day but how it functions has changed with the personnel changes. There's a lot more pace in the side now. Kelly and Shipley are not fast but quicker than Doyle/Ogogo and Kelly's passing is vastly superior to Doyle which allows us to transition from defence to attack quickly. Thomas is quicker than Bayliss at right forward, Bright than Andreu and Baka I would say is quicker over the ground than Biamou. It's resulted in a system that is effective away from home because even the poor teams try to win their home games and we have a lot of pace and direct ball carriers to counter with in Thomas, Bright, Bayliss, Hiwula . 11 goals in our last 5 away games which includes Sunderland, Portsmouth, Barnsley, Peterborough whereas we're 5 in 5 at home against lesser opposition, failing to score against Oxford and Bristol R tells it's own story..

How much of where we are at now is luck or judgement is hard to say. For most of the season we've tried to play a formation that we didn't quite have the right players for.
Andreu played 10 but was unfit, Chaplin played 10, I think even Shipley had a game or 2 there too but it's not until Bright came in that it worked well. Not even sure he was signed to play there either as his first game was as the left forward.
Bayliss started on the right and ended up in CM doing the running for Doyle for a long spell - I still wonder how much that took out of him.
Hiwula's been all over the place - started left forward then played left midfield, dropped to the bench, then centre forward, before making his current position on the left of the 3 his own.
Biamou, JCH, Chaplin, Hiwula and Baka have all played 9 without sustained success.

For me the preferred formation is clearly 4-2-3-1 and we are closer to making that work now than at the start of the season. I think we can say that this season has been a learning curve for players and manager and it's been a successful transition back to L1 that has surpassed most people's expectations before a ball was kicked. We still have a big issue to sort out with the home set-up and form, see:
Goal margins/Goalscoring

Key is to stay at the Ricoh so we can recruit adequately as I'm sure Robins has got good plans for the transfer market that will give us the option to change things up at home.

To be honest, top 8 is higher than I thought before the season started.

Trying not to look back at games like Walsall and all the others with dropped points as it just annoys me, if we could have held on to certain games or put easy chances away we would probably be top 5.

If we can retain the main core of players and Robins can draft players in who will suit his style of play (as well as the pitch being sorted whereever we are) to allow us to play it then I am excited for next season.

Nick said:

To be honest, top 8 is higher than I thought before the season started.

Trying not to look back at games like Walsall and all the others with dropped points as it just annoys me, if we could have held on to certain games or put easy chances away we would probably be top 5.

If we can retain the main core of players and Robins can draft players in who will suit his style of play (as well as the pitch being sorted whereever we are) to allow us to play it then I am excited for next season.

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^ this. We're building really well.

covcity4life said:

I mentioned finishing in my post

We need to continue this style of footy. Pitch whilst not great is noway near as bad as some make out

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Apologies!