@theAnticlough Gillingham did the simple things right & their defence was solid. Dennis & Jatta couldn't get through them, but I do think they lacked the service today.

Notts are clearly in transition with the direct approach being more prominent than we've seen over the last several years. It could have paid off today if Notts had not made that defensive mistake.

Just listened to MP's latest after match interview and he seems very incoherent and I think this is reflected in the way the team is performing at the moment. I think one of the problems is we have half the team from last season playing the way we have for the previous few years and the other half used to playing a different way resulting in players not being on the same wavelength. The result being very disjointed performances. We seem to have lost our identity as a team. We have gone from a passing team to one one that goes long with no real purpose. We have arguably two of the best strikers in the league yet we only have one shot on target. Something is not right. Is MP the man to solve it?

@McPie Yes I agree we do look disjointed & you make a good point about sets of players seem to be on different vwavlengths between a passing game & long game.

The owners look like they've made the decision to change the style somewhat under Paterson. We have to stick with Paterson now.

My own personal view is that I would have stuck with Maynard, I would have appointed a Head of Football who had lots of League 2 experience, & I would have only recruited up to five extra good quality players to supplement what we already had.

I'd go for this reading of it @McPie rather than transitioning to a different style.

We pass it around at the back almost as much, Palmer shows, so do the WBs. But they're a lot deeper, and it seems a lifetime ago that Ruben or Crowley played in Nemane around the back between 5 to 10 times a game.

With deeper WBs and 2 up top, we just don't have the patterns of play that inside forwards like Ruben, Crowley, Didzy gave us to build up thru the lines. That's why we see the speculative long balls to nowhere. It seems Norburn is there to compensate for MP not being all that strong defensively, so there's a duplication and a waste of a man in itself.

Gillingham were very strong off the ball and in pressing, but apart from that I wasn't all that impressed. Maybe this year's Wimbledon, especially with a good coach who's done it all before.

We are playing faster and with more intent though - that's a big change in itself

That was probably one of the worst games of football I've ever seen, and I wish I was exaggerating. The ball spent most of the time in the air.

Whilst we've won 3 of our last 4, there was only certain periods of times where we actually played well in those games, plus that of Newport on the opening day. Today, the lack of a clear plan and identity was on show. It wasn't due to Gillingham high pressing us, not at all. When they didn't press, we looked very unsure as to what to do with the ball and where it needed to go. No surprise the ball went out of play for most of added time.

Quite a lot of the time, the ball would be played into the channels in hope we would counter press their defence and try to win the ball back, when it got there. There wasn't much in terms of passing patterns or structures. It was all just very slow and a bit clueless. Under Luke and Stu, I could work out what we were trying to do. Still trying to work out what we are at the moment.

Are we a possesion based side? Are we a long ball team? Do we go down the wings and put crosses in? Are we hybrid of possession and being more physical and doing the battling qualities more? Like, what are we? Feels like we've chucked away our identity, when it all needed was an upgrade in head coach and tweaks.

I've spoken about Gagliardi in his own dedicated topic page, but whilst he's left, the problems he created still remain.

4 hours ago, ARLukomski said:

Are we a possesion based side? Are we a long ball team? Do we go down the wings and put crosses in? Are we hybrid of possession and being more physical and doing the battling qualities more? Like, what are we? Feels like we've chucked away our identity, when it all needed was an upgrade in head coach and tweaks

I think that's the idea, but can't be sure!

We were right to move on from the negativity and defeatism under SM. Don't want to be cruel and wish him well, but football matches aren't telecom call-outs where all you've got to do is find the right technical solution. 8 league games of trying to be more positive and aggressive under MP....maybe away at the league leaders isn't a fair one-off game to evaluate, but we are coming up to the 10 game mark that was mentioned. We need to put a couple of good performances in.

I can only go off what others have said, having only been able to listen, but it was hardly a match that will live long in the memory. Gillingham have 7 shots, we have 8 it’s one of those that feel likes if you play it 9 times out of 10 it finishes 0-0.

The post-match interview makes it sound like we lost 2 or 3 nil. We only needed to score 1 goal and we’d have got a point there but Martin seems to be very hung up on the 30 seconds in a 90-minute match in which we concede. In 90 minutes of football, when you play teams around your level you should be able to create a couple of decent chances but we didn’t.

He talks a lot about playing forward too, we had a very similar problem last season, it’s hard when you play 3 at the back, two very deep fullbacks and two deep midfielders… I agree with the previous points about the identity and think there's lack of balance to the first 11 too, are we overloaded with defensive players now? Yes we've got two strikers on the pitch but if they are isolated and playing off scraps there's almost not point. You can play 1 striker and have an attacking team.

The difference between Gillingham and Notts was clear. They handled the situation better, got stuck in, and looked like a group of men. Notts didn’t have that same presence. We were pushed, pulled, and drawn into giving away easy fouls.

Some of the decisions made by the referee and officials were never fouls at all. We need to cope better with the dark arts of the game because we can’t always play our way out of everything.