Cod Almighty | Diary

The wind beneath my wing-backs

10 March 2025

Miss Guest Diary writes: Woohoo! Town were in a play-off spot for about an hour on Saturday afternoon and (whisper it) if they beat Notts County tomorrow night would rise to fifth in the table. Who'd have thought that a couple of months ago? More surprisingly, who'd have thought Mr Hard-To-Please Butcher would be describing Saturday's game at Walsall as Town's "most compelling, complete performance for many a year."

It seems that Professor Artell knows what he's doing after all. I will be the first to admit that I've had my doubts about his abilities – which resurfaced last week when the three team changes he made for the game against bottom of the table Tranmere appeared to completely wreck the balance of the team. I was also fearful when I saw Saturday's line up that the enforced absence of Doug Tharme meant a reversion to the 4-3-3 formation, but he stuck with what Mr Butcher likes to describe as "3ish-4ish-2ish-1" and came home with three points in the bag.

I've said before that I don't pay a lot of attention to formations and find it hard to distinguish between many of the combinations we've been 'treated' to since the days of Sir Alan Buckley. But I can spot the three-at-the-back plus wing-backs that Artell has played on and off – it served us well in avoiding relegation last season and is now doing the business in driving us towards the play offs. So I was interested to read Jonathan Liew's column in Saturday's Guardian in which he suggests this "may just be the year of the flying wing-back revival". Liew refutes Gary Neville's suggestion that wing-back is a specialist position, citing a number of Premier League wing-backs who have been successfully converted from wingers or full-backs, which he suggests is the result of "time on the training pitch, drilling and dedication".

I think you can see where I'm going with this, particularly in relation to our Icelandic Glider. At the start of the season Svanthorsson was a winger who looked fey and out of his depth, now he is a wing-back who can – seemingly by magic – take the ball off a much larger opponent and, more importantly, hold on to it to set up an attack. Also this year we've seen Evan Khouri turn into a colossus in midfield, Kieran Green set up and score goals and, of late, even Harvey Rodgers getting forward to score. When he came to us Artell had the reputation of being an excellent coach of young players and we are finally seeing the results for ourselves.

Now the worry is not about relegation but about richer and more glamorous clubs swooping for our star pupils in the summer. Maybe even the Professor himself. Well we wouldn't be real Town fans if we weren't fretting about something, would we.

UTM