What we need, as you say Nick, is a combatative, ball winning, midfield general. Just how many times do we tackle and win the ball back in the centre of the park?
The truth is, we lack any strength in the midfield at all. This is one thing we can very much criticise Pressley for. It appears that he has made no attempt whatsoever to address this position in this respect.
Yes, we had that unbeaten run of 7 games, but it now appears that since then the opposition have always done their homework well on us and they can always counter anything we can throw at them ..... or in our case, gently lob.
We had 2 games where Haynes came in and was obviously a completely new entiity to opposing teams and he had a field day. Teams then targeted him and for the most part have almost completely shut him out of games.
What we lack is strength in midfield. We also lack on the whole a quick countering game. We tend to be very pedestrian in our build up play and very predictable too. I sit in the stands and witness very little cleverness or trickery. You can usually very much predict where the ball is going to go all the time. From keeper to back four, little triangles, left to right, to right to left again and then a long ball.
There's not much in reverse passing and doing the unexpected. It tends to go one way and then predictably back the other. There's very little clever little passes that catch the opposition out or on the wrong foot. Our passes tend to always be very expected and are all but telegraphed. You know where they are going to go with the ball pretty much every time we have it. That's very easy to defend against.
Can't remember the last time I saw something particularly clever from us. Maddison did show a bit of that about him mind yesterday. Fleck can be quite clever at times, but still, we just don't have enough of that in the squad.
It was embarrassing yesterday and at times it looked like giants versus midgets.
In League One you need strength and pace. We have some pace about us, but next to no strength. It's a big worry. I think we are going to really struggle against most physical sides. Reda gives us that strength and muscle at the back, but it is totally missing in the middle of the park and if you take Nouble out of the equation, we have nothing up front there either.
I have always been supportive of Pressley in the past (his bizzarre post match interviews apart), but he has made a serious error of judgment in his transfer dealings by not addressing the need for some strength and muscle.
Swanson? O'Brien? Miller? McQuoid? Jackson? Coulibaly? Tudgay?
Add to that the fact that we now have a very poor goalkeeper behind the sticks and you can see where it is all going wrong and where it could be a recipe for disaster.
We need a new keeper desperately. We need a physical midfield general desperately and we need another big strong target man.
The kids are looking good, but in this physical league they are not the answer at the moment.
We also desperately need to look at the system we are deploying too. We simply are not creating anough chances and therefore making life very difficult for us. We go a goal down, we lose.
Hard to be positive about anything at the moment and that's even before you start thinking about off the pitch and the fact that the Ricoh has just been sold to a rugby team from 80 miles away.
It's all very, very desperate.
Ignore Pressley's comments of our being 'not very far from where we want to be.' It's a thin line between success and failure for sure and you can be relatively close in games, but if you keep losing 2-1 you will go down. It's no good constantly being 'nearly there.'
Against Crewe we apparently played well for 45 mins. Yesterday, it was just 15. Don't be clouded by the fact the finished we game well. The previous 75 mins we were pretty clueless. Had we been good for he first 15 only people would now be saying there were no positives, rather than that we finished the game quite well.
We look 'pretty' but it's all huff and puff and powder puff.
We are now 7 points behind 6th place and the gap is widening and we are now just a point off the bottom four. We seriously now need to start looking over our shoulders.
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