Cod Almighty | Match Stats

Saturday 26 August 2017

Division 4

Grimsby Town 2 Rose (pen, 52), Hooper (65)

Wycombe Wanderers 3 Akinfenwa (28, 75), Jacobson (pen, 43)

Attendance: 4016 (187 away fans)

Why? Why not? Zak Mills had a little bit of oomph and made a couple of excellent interceptions and interventions after the sea wall had crumbled. Rewarding persistentish adequacy is the name of the game.

We can't keep shooting ourselves in the foot and not giving ourselves an opportunity, we're always trying to win it from going behind or on the back foot because we're down to ten.

More on this

Less worse than has been the new usual, but still powderpuff stuff.

Everything and everyone is so underpowered. Bouncing off a man mountain is no disgrace, but feebling off a fumbling full-back is. Passes are slow and low, crosses are high and hanging. Tracking is something to do with your tyres, closing down is what happens on the High Street. Dembele was smothered under a duvet, but DJ Jinky was a single spark of attacking life, the crumb which we nibbled while awaiting air supplies to be dropped to us starving masses.

Hooper tried for ten minutes after he walloped in that cracker and Berrett was again neutrally adequate. The two centre-backs failed to use their 135 years of Football League knowledge to deal with a big bloke, with Collins looking suspiciously and alarmingly fed up with this nonsense. If Slade plays Kelly and Hooper again as the two strikers then that's grounds for instant dismissal.

Four defeats in a row. Five red cards in a row. The evidence is mounting. The writing is on the wall. You make your own bad luck in this game.

The most mundane set of wandering minstrels seen this side of the fourteenth century easily mugged the misfits and unfit to serve. Akinfenwa is big, they seek to bounce balls and centre-backs off him. That's the plan. It ain't subtle, it ain't a secret. Competent opponents do sensible things to stop the ball getting there, and sensible things to smother if the ball does reach its destination. Lucky for Wycombe that this Town, more than any other Town, this Town can't get it right.

Their keeper looked ropey, their defence holey, but they had some organisation and enough gumption to do all their nudging and nurdling subtly and, if not subtly, then far, far away with their heads up in the clouds and feet down in the crowds. They were imploding after Town started to resemble a football team.

Less potent and noxious than last year's model, these quartered quibblers were nothing special, in fact a bit of a bore. They'll be the usual play-off hangers, like everyone else in this division of dross, apart from Town and Crawley of course.

Presently happy to grasp hold of any passing fig leaf to avoid reality.

Mr M Heywood

Rubbish. The linesman at the Pontoon end was rubbish. They were all rubbish. The raspberry fool gave two appalling penalties and was indiscriminately inconsistent when judging nudging. He sought to even out the daft decision to award Wycombe a penalty but the consequences of his original decision led to the red card. Don't get anyone started on that ridiculous linesman either. But let us not blame it on the bogieman, Town lost because of Town, the officials simply did nothing to hinder the inevitable implosion. Oh, numbers… 5.333.

Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy. Collins off in a flouncy.

In a Word: weedy