DangerousSausage

Excellent performance, three nil was flattering to Weymouth. Perhaps a bit wasteful now and then, but Weymouth were saved by the bar a couple of times too. Great entertainment, thoroughly enjoyed it. We look like a different team. So now we need a point at Bromley to get fifth. In a way it's good that something is riding on it, otherwise there's a temptation to field a weakened team and maybe lose some momentum. Prediction league is over now mate, sorry ????

Excellent result, 4 goals (that's 7 in two matches) and back in the playoffs, great stuff. Really good that Rodders has hit form too. Interesting that, instead of basking in the win, IB immediately voiced his annoyance with the team relaxing after the last goal in his interview. A bit more intensity and concentration would certainly do us good. As far as making the playoffs is concerned, it's in our own hands.

5-3 to Notts. Goalie Michael Doyle struggles in the first half and is replaced by Jimmy Knowles at half time, who steadies the ship. We turn it around in the second half with a scintillating display of attacking verve. Paul Bolland will score two, along with goals from Bob Catlin, Shergar and that Miller bloke (when attempting a back pass). Burchnall will say we played well in the second half.

It's really jarring to listen to fighting talk in interviews, only to listen to the commentators almost crying with frustration at the lack of urgency on matchday. Looking at the table, we've still got a very real chance of making the playoffs, but we seem to have given up. IB isn't to blame for our weakness in key areas, of course, but part of the art of being a manager is getting the best out of what's at your disposal, and so far he's failing lamentably. It's getting to the point where you wonder if it goes a bit deeper than a poor spell of form. I wonder if we have a number of players who knew they were leaving at the end of the season, but were giving their all for Neal. Now he's gone, they're phoning in.

It's just an automatic post made in advance. Time hasn't been kind to them ????

When it was pointed out that their form was so much better than ours, I thought we had a chance. Football has a habit of turning the form book upside down like that. Sickening to lose out in the last minute like that, but encouraging to hear of the improved performance. How did Steele get on?

If there were a pill that makes you lose all interest in football, would you take it?

I truly hope we stop the experiment with wing backs. We simply don't have the players to do it. I think a return to 4 at the back is likely, and Doyle will probably start too (hopefully in place of Reeves instead of alongside him). So we've lost 3 on the trot, while Torquay are on a great run. All the more reason to play without pressure and turn the form book upside down.

Why do we insist on playing wing backs when we have no wing backs at the club? Either they can't defend or they can't cross. Some can't do either. The squad has obviously been set up with a 4-2-3-1 in mind, so we might as well play that if we're to avoid playing round pegs in square holes. Mind you, if no-one's going to make themselves available to receive the ball or make runs it doesn't really matter what we play. I thought about buying the stream, but the sun was shining so I thought I'd get some vitamin D and do some weeding in the garden while listening on the radio. Good decision. The weeding was much more fun than the "football".

Great result, especially after dropping behind. Today and Friday have shown how vital it is to have someone who can come on, run at the opposition and change the game. With Knight and (hopefully) Roberts, we now have two players who can help us move up a gear if it isn't going our way. With that we gain two points on Sutton and Hartlepool and another three on Wrexham, so not a bad day's work. Looking at it now, we should aim to make the top three and then see what's possible - Sutton can still be caught, but there's little room for error. The rest of this month will be massive - Hartlepool away next, Torquay away and a double header against Eastleigh.

That was a very positive afternoon and an excellent result. I only listened on the radio, but it sounded like we grew into the game and played a bit further up than we usually do. Knight sounds promising and I'm looking forward to seeing him play. With Roberts we have someone who scares the opposition to death and creates space for others - it'll be fantastic if we can have him starting again, he's like a cheat code at this level. It's good to see defenders mixing it up at set pieces a bit more, and it's also interesting to see Chicksen in the team again - IB seems to rate him more than Ardley, who'd sooner have played the mascot in that position. For all our recent struggles the table doesn't look bad, the gap to Sutton aside. Now let's build on it at Woking!

Sounds like more of the same tonight, especially with the lack of chances created. We were already in a hole confidence-wise, and changing the manager doesn't seem to have helped at all. There doesn't appear to be any reaction because half the team has nothing left in the tank. They seem exhausted mentally, if not physically. For all the loanees we've brought in, tonight's team virtually picked itself. Wootton and Reeves cannot be dropped because we have no alternatives. The new manager has a hell of a job on his hands to get this team playing quicker, more bravely and with self-belief.

What an absolute shambles that was. For the first ten minutes, despite the team selection, I hoped we'd see something a bit different - we tried to get in behind them from the off, and had a nice tempo to our play. But soon we were back to the ponderous build-up play we're all so sick of. At times in the second half we couldn't get out of our own half. Hornchurch were positive and played hard, but their press hardly looked difficult to get out of - there were huge gaps there, yet we still couldn't cope. I've got no desire to recall the game and give a blow-by-blow account, Ellis and Rawlinson being given the runaround by a man with a beer gut and a double chin tells you all you need to know. If we'd gone out against Morpeth, I wouldn't have cared much. It was a weakened team, and we could have claimed we were concentrating on the league. But this was different - a chance to reward the fans with a trip to Wembley and win a trophy. It was an important game. I'll give the new manager a pass on this one (although how he can watch several of our matches in full length and decide another 90 minutes of the Doyle and Reeves show is a good idea I'll never know), but the players need to have a word with themselves. That shower won't win promotion in a million years. There's always someone worse off than yourself though - some of our fans are of the Irish persuasion, and rounded the day off by watching their national team lose at home to Luxembourg...

Well, isn't this absolutely pathetic?

That really was pants, starting with Barnett shinning the ball out of play with our first touch of the match (and doing the same thing in stoppage time when we had a promising break on), all the way through to Reeves(?) messing about and finally passing it backwards in the LAST SECONDS OF STOPPAGE TIME when he should have been putting the ball into the box. Halifax were a typical NL team that came to press us and put us under pressure, and increasingly sat back as the game went on. They were bang average, yet we barely tested them. We never look good when trying to play 4-3-3 as the gaps between the players are just too big. But regardless of what we play, our midfield pairing is stifling us - they always play too deep, they slow the play down, they offer nothing in an attacking sense and now they've forgotten how to pass too. They're also two of too many players we've got who know they'll always play 90 minutes of every game, come what may. We know what this league is about now. We need to be positive, we need to get in the opposition's faces and take the fight to them. That is how we will control games. What we shouldn't be doing is attempting to tiki-taka the ball to the opposition's six-yard box in painful slow motion. It does not work. If we don't learn that lesson, we'll be lucky to finish in the top half, never mind the play-offs.

I prefer to focus on the positives. Slocombe caught the ball nicely a few times. The stream is smooth. My sofa is comfortable and the beer tastes good. That's it.

I don't think some of the more extreme doom and gloom is justified after 13 points in 6 games, but it is frustrating to work ourselves into an extremely promising position, only to slip back again. It's now very obvious that our lack of goals or attacking threat in general is a serious problem. Our only goal in the last 270 minutes of football was a long-range punt (albeit a very nice one). It's not just a lack of goals though - we just don't put the opposition under any pressure (when did we last win a penalty?) and instead rely on individual quality instead of creating chances from team moves. It's tempting to think that the return of Cal Roberts will help, but I fear our problems go a bit deeper than the personnel.

Well that was rather pleasant, wasn't it?! Leaving two up front and staying positive was definitely the right decision, but to be fair it was also the only decision - parking the bus for 70 plus minutes with an outfield player in goal would have just been an invitation for the visitors to pepper the area with crosses and shots. Great stuff from the whole team. Meadow Lane would have been bouncing. I hope we can take some momentum from this, and fingers crossed for Luke Pilling in goal over the next few games (those FA Trophy appearances should come in handy now). Unless Schmeichel Doyle wants another go? Looking at the table, we're now 11 points behind Torquay with 4 games in hand. In terms of points per game, we're potentially a win away from catching them. And PPG could matter this season.

And so the pitch was waterlogged and we move on to Havant & Waterlooville revisited instead. On the one hand, this will at least give us the chance to test out Barnett at left-back and Miller in a more advanced position when there are no league points at stake. On the other, I would really like to get on with our league programme...

You can't really complain about another win and another clean sheet - it's ultimately better than playing pretty football and then dropping points due to defensive frailties. Teams that win promotion tend to be the ones that pick up "lucky" wins by the odd goal on a regular basis. If you do it enough, it's not really luck... The plodding midfield bothers me, as does the fact that, for all our possession, we don't really do anything with it and rely on moments of individual quality (or, yesterday, a lucky cross-shot) to unlock the opposition instead. On the other hand, if you keep clean sheets - and our defensive record has been superb of late - a single chance could well be enough. Whether that's enough to compete for top spot remains to be seen.

Has anyone here had their jab yet? What was it like? I'm hoping to have mine sometime before the year 3000

Not a bad result, but not the result we needed. Torquay have got a clean sheet and a point away from home, and they've prevented a potential rival from closing the gap. They'll be pleased. Overall it was a very hard-working display against a good team. The first half had 0-0 written all over it - we didn't have any clear chances, partly because of our reluctance to commit men up front, and the same applied for Torquay. We occasionally had a sniff due to a couple of dodgy back passes, but that was it. Both teams grew braver as the second half wore on, both had some good chances and could have won it, so a draw was fair in the end. It's just a bit of a shame we're unwilling to pull the trigger at times.

Is these one of these "football matches" that we used to have back in the olden days? I remember them from when I was young, some of them were quite good. The team in black and white were usually rubbish, but they were my favourites anyway. Torquay are already 15 points ahead of us, albeit having played three games more. Theoretically we could whittle that down to 3 by beating them and winning our games in hand, but we won't. That would be almost insurmountable in the unlikely (ha!) event that the season isn't finished. We need a win to have any hope of top spot at the end of the season.

I've got to agree with @Super_Danny_Allsopp. The irony is that the absolute refusal of many remain-supporting Labour and Lib Dem MPs to even countenance anything other than overturning the EU referendum has led to our links with the EU ultimately being much weaker than they could have been. Remember the indicative votes in parliament under May? A majority for a "soft" Brexit and single market membership was there for the taking, yet this was voted down at every turn by MPs who only wanted a second referendum. The referendum then became Labour policy at the last election, we all know the result (although naturally the "centrist" MPs around Starmer have no intention of shouldering their share of the blame). The referendum result was (rightly or wrongly) a cry for change. The Tories have been able to co-opt that for their purposes, while a significant part of the "opposition" has spent the last four years chasing its tail and arguing that things were actually fine just the way they were.

Interesting discussion in the posts above. From what I gather so far, the final deal seems to be a classic face-saver - a way for politicians on both sides to claim victory. BJ can claim that the UK is no longer subject to the level playing field with regard to labour and environmental laws (good luck getting conservatives to explain why exactly it would be a good idea to undercut the EU's very modest labour laws). While this is true in a sense, the UK will be subject to tariffs if it considerably undercuts the EU's protections - which is exactly what the EU proposed in the first place. So the UK government can trumpet its (apparent) independence while the technocrats at the EU can claim to have protected the integrity of the single market. We're going to spend a long time discovering the devil in the detail of this. One is the loss of the Erasmus scheme, which the Tories had pledged to keep. Plenty of non-EU countries participate in this. Instead, the government wants to launch its own scheme in which students can stud "at the best universities worldwide". But the point of Erasmus was never to study at the "best universities", and in any case your grades during your Erasmus year don't count towards your degree. The point is to boost cultural links with our European neighbours and improve language skills. My fear is that the government will instead send students to English-speaking countries, making us even more monolingual than we were already.