menzinho

Stoke City 1-2 Coventry City Wrexham 2-1 Charlton Athletic Doncaster Rovers 2-1 Barnsley Exeter City 0-1 Wigan Athletic Bristol Rovers 0-0 Gillingham Harrogate Town 1-2 Oldham Athletic 🃏 Morecambe 3-1 Sutton United Truro City 1-1 Altrincham

We’ve played with a variation of a 3-5-2 (3-4-2-1) for years now and it’s worked for us so far. Also when you look at the teams that were promoted last season Bradford, Port Vale and Wimbledon all played some variation of a 3-5-2 as well. Every formation has its strengths and weaknesses, I think the 4-4-2 covers the pitch well but you can be overrun in midfield if you face a team that plays with 3 centre mids or a box midfield. With the 3-4-2-1 we are very solid in central areas but it demands a lot of the wing-backs because they almost have to do the job of two players and they sometimes get pinned in if facing a full back and a winger. I’m not overly concerned with the formation, I think it works well for how we want to play, the two attacking midfielders and two central midfielders mean we should be able to get a lot of control in the middle of the pitch and dominate. Sometimes I just wish the wing-backs play a tad higher, they were really deep under Stuart and that seems to have followed on with Martin. Maybe Luke Williams has warped my mind as to how wing-backs should play (because under him they were basically wingers!) I think the approach to how you play is probably more important to us and that is to be brave (not sit too deep) play forward and be relentless with the press to pin-teams in. We’ve done it in phases and stages this season, just in the last two matches the intent and bravery hasn’t quite been there for me but there's no reason to suggest we can't get back into a positive approach.

I’d do well to give anyone a 7 after that, maybe Ness or Bedeau but again at times even they struggled. The fact our defenders were our better players against a team struggling in the League below is pretty tragic. Even after sleeping on it I can’t get over how poor we were going forward. We didn’t manage to put them under any real sustained pressure, or cause their keeper and defence to panic like ours did. If we’d have created a host of decent chances and missed them or forced their keeper to make a number of saves I’d have felt a lot better getting knocked out. But our super-fit side which made all the subs still couldn’t get the better of a tiring team that bought on Connor Hall who looked completely unfit and effectively made the match 10 v 11. We can add this to the collection of "FA Cup Horror Matches", which already is pretty full...

Being 2-1 up with just the couple of minutes to go didn't feel like a fair reflection of the match. I thought we were really poor, we spent the last 20 minutes with a lot of the ball but we were totally incapable of killing the match off. I don’t think we even managed a shot after the penalty. Other than making a save from JJ’s freekick and picking the ball out his net twice their keeper had nothing to do. We looked scared of them, we were pretty awful on the ball and totally deserved to lose in the end. We got lucky with the officiating too, they had a goal ruled off for no obvious reason and it was a really soft penalty for us, it doesn’t even look like there was contact on the replay. Just another horrific night for us in the FA Cup, can we just not enter it next season.

Clearly hasn’t been through lack of interest that Shrewsbury hasn’t sold, especially as he says 18 different parties have met him. I think he’s trying to get the sympathy vote a bit here, because it’s not going well at Shrewsbury now. Of course, the abuse he gets isn’t right and it’s not on, but at the same time he clearly isn’t that desperate to sell the club. A number of years have passed since he put Shrewsbury up for sale so he could’ve done a deal if he really wanted to. I wonder if the club hasn’t sold because he has an unrealistic valuation, is he just holding out for as much money as he can get?

Unfortunately I think the return of Macca is a bit of a pipe dream for us, especially as we are still in League 2. Pretty much every club in League 1 would be happy to have him (assuming they can afford him!)

I think because we’ve got a Trophy match against Man Utd Academy on Tuesday and no league match until the following Monday (yes a horrible weekend without Notts awaits) we’ll see a strong side. As Platt hasn’t played for weeks Ness is likely to start and I hope this finally a turning point for him in terms of staying fit. That said I feel like it can’t just be a coincidence that he’s injured all the time, unfortunately some footballers are just more susceptible to injuries. He really needs to get through a number of matches now, following on from his return last weekend. I’d keep the midfield the same, maybe change one of the wingbacks or attacking midfielders but keep Jatta upfront, in the hope he’ll be able to bully their defence. Dennis coming on for the last 30 when they are tiring is perfect, he can run and that’s the last thing they’ll want. Can't say I know much about Brackley, my guess would be they'll try and 'get at us' from the kick off but we've got enough quality to get control of this match. I know it's on the TV and these FA Cup outings usually end up as shockers for us but I'm quietly confident we'll have enough about us to get into the second round.

If he waits for a few weeks Bristol Rovers might be looking for a new manager, that’s just over the border for him. I think it’s mad that no football academy or head-coach has been on the phone to get him because he’d be absolutely perfect for that. He’s already said he’s not that fussed if he’s a head-coach or part of a coaching team in his next role. And given how he’s switched career entirely he’s got no ego or sense of entitlement, he strikes me as being a really good team player as well as someone who can lead.

The back to back away matches to end the year almost doesn't seem fair, but that's how it goes... It does look tough on paper right now but fingers crossed one or more of these teams is in a bad run of form by the time we face them. MK would be ideal seeing as we play them twice in the space of a few weeks. I can't remember the last time we played a team with such a short break between them, especially in the EFL. I know in the National League we had the same team for the Boxing Day/NYD fixture, but I wasn't a massive fan of that.

Yeah, I'd be really interested to know how his departure played out because as it turns out the summer recruitment seemingly hasn't been the massive issue we all thought it would be. It's funny that Cotter previously played under Paterson when he was at Barnsley and he signed after Paterson arrived (Iorpenda did too, but he signed before MP got the head-coach job). It's highly likely this move was instigated by our head coach and it's arguably one the poorer signings this season...

I think we can improve when it comes to defending set-pieces and I’m sure a lot of work goes into it. I've spoken about how I think Roos can do more but it's just as important that the players know their man and they stick to them. At times against the physical teams, we do look more susceptible to conceding from set-pieces, but that is a massive part of what makes those teams successful and they’ll score the majority of their goals from this. I think our average of goals conceded from set-pieces will be always be slightly higher and that is down to how a lot of teams set-up against us. The majority of the teams in the league are going to sit deep, try and counter and make the most of their set-pieces. It was exactly what Cambridge (tried to do) and what Oldham and Crewe did with varying success. And to be fair, against Barnet they had 12 corners and number of decent free-kick positions and they got nothing out of us. I’m not overly hung-up about set-pieces right now because overall, we are in a good place when it comes to our defence this season. We are the joint 4th best in the league in terms of goals conceded with 15. Oldham are top with 12 but it’s coming at cost for them as they’ve only scored 12 goals too (that’s the joint 2nd worse). We’ve scored 25 goals, that puts us 2nd best. If this trend continues, we’ll be in strong place come the end of the season.

Yeah, I think my mini-shortlist would be Jatta, Palmer and Ness. But considering we didn’t create many chances it meant Jatta had to be clinical and he was.

I'm with @McPie I feel a great amount of satisfaction when a team comes to Meadow Lane, sits back has very little attacking intention and goes away with nothing. Cambridge can set-up however they like, they are entirely within their right to do it but it never makes for a great match. It’s always hard when you come against a side that sits really deep, we had little space to play through the middle or even wide. And when we tried to pick up the pace with our passing it tended to go astray. Still, we were very comfortable without really creating much but the longer it stayed 0-0 the more you’d have thought it would’ve turned in Cambridge's favour. But we kept at it, the subs came on and freshened/livened us up a bit and Jatta was the difference maker in the end (get ready to knock those bids back come January). It’s hard to explain but we feel more like a team this season, we undoubtedly lost some talent in the summer but you can’t fault any of the players attitude and endeavour. 2 points off top spot, does that mean we are good now?

I feel a bit sorry for him because he’s not had a lot of time to change much, but equally from what I can gather from some of his post-match interviews it didn't sound like the squad had taken to him. Surprised he even ended up there to be honest, to go from League 2 to the Southern Prem is a bit of drop, even to be head-coach. As the article says they’ve had 4 managers in 17 matches and the results haven’t improved. That tells me the real problem lies with the quality of the squad.

Blackburn Rovers 1-3 Southampton Millwall 1-1 Leicester City Barnsley 2-1 Rotherham United Reading 1-0 Doncaster Rovers Barrow 1-2 Barnet Harrogate Town 2-0 Newport County 🃏 Forest Green Rovers 3-1 Boreham Wood Hartlepool United 1-2 Solihull Moors