StarkMallard

Think yourself lucky, I could see all of it on PiesPlayer!

Thanks for playing everyone, I'll post the points tomorrow. A heads-up - there will be another round on Tuesday evening, so I'll post the next batch of fixtures tomorrow morning!

I'm really trying to be patient as we have only had three games. Sometimes you appear to be having a poor start but then unexpectedly win a couple and suddenly it all looks a lot better. But having seen our opening games I don't think that's likely. The brothers have already shown they can take tough decisions when they need to. If we're knocking around the bottom four after about ten games, I'd expect Martin Paterson's job to be on the line. Gagliardi will probably get another transfer window. So who's to blame if the season turns out as bad as we fear? Everyone. I think our success in recruitment in recent years has made the owners complacent when it comes to selling players. They seem to think anyone can be replaced. On top of that, taking so long to recruit a new head coach no doubt meant we lost out on transfer targets. It's definitely too early to say whether the technical board is having an effect on team matters, but it almost certainly scared off potential head coaches. The DoF is in charge of putting the squad together. It's too early to deliver a final judgement on our summer signings, but the signs so far are far from promising - we have a lop-sided squad heavy on wing backs but light in the areas that badly needed strengthening, with loanees filling the gaps. But then he's operating within the financial and time restraints the owners give him. And of course there's the head coach. He's got an unwieldy squad that has lost key players, but he's also got the bulk of the team that reached the playoffs last season. It's his job to get the best out of what he's got. They're not this bad. Today I saw confused, demoralised players; there was no sign of pre-prepared routines for set pieces (always just hit and hope) or a clear idea of how we should be playing. The least a coach can do is to get his players to move into space and show for the ball. I hope we'll look back on this thread in a few weeks and think it's alarmist, but I don't have a good feeling at all.

It was indeed @Fan of Big Tone, I stand corrected.

Absolutely, but in the areas we need please and not yet more wing backs! The recruitment is looking like a mess so far. Quantity over quality. It also doesn't say much for our recruitment when we have just one striker available after four games. Another little positive for @Fan of Big Tone : the lovely cross from Jones for our goal. Dennis nearly had a one-on-one with the keeper in the first half thanks to a nice ball from him too.

That was desperate. We were better for a period in the second half, but even then players weren't showing for the ball or running into space. The ball was wellied over the opposite touchline with alarming regularity. I still have no idea what MP wants to do, we certainly can't see what they're working on in training, and that's a very bad sign. Eight of the first 11 who got us into the playoffs last season are still with us, yet we look like a bottom four team. Barrow and Newport will be glad just to stay up, yet we took just a point from those two games. I'll write more once I've calmed down. The 500 plus who travelled to Barrow deserved a lot better than that.

Nice scenery behind the side with the three stands, you can see the mountains in the distance. Didn't realise it was so close to the Lake District. The rubbish footballers in the foreground distracted me, but only once or twice.

Preston North End 0-2 Leicester City (joker) Swansea City 2-1 Sheffield United Leyton Orient 0-1 Stockport County Reading 1-1 AFC Wimbledon Barnet 1-0 Walsall Tranmere Rovers 0-2 Gillingham Aldershot 1-1 Boston United Hartlepool United 2-0 Braintree Town

After just eight months at Carlisle, our Wembley hero is on the move again - this time very close to home at South Shields of the National League North. There was an undisclosed fee. Hope he can finally get playing and scoring regularly now!

They were a very imposing sight, visible for miles around. You could also see West Burton (which is still standing) in the distance. I remember watching coal being sent there by train back in the day. It's sad to see industrial heritage being lost, but there's not a lot of point maintaining disused cooling towers in a field somewhere. In the end, the power station was used for 20 years longer than intended and has been earmarked as a site for a nuclear fusion test plant. Shout-out to the folk who turned up to watch the towers at Ratcliffe not being demolished yesterday!

The key to longevity is not dying. If you don't do that, you'll literally live forever. I think this is a case of correlation not necessarily being causation. Maybe towns with larger libraries also tend to have better infrastructure and a higher standard of living?

The best ones are fresh from the butcher's, but even their supermarket sausages have much more meat than our version. Sorry, but sausages are one area where they're far superior to us. But on the other hand, we've got sausage rolls and pork pies. They've no idea what they're missing out on.

I'll help you keep tabs @Chris! It would be good to have a rematch on home turf, but there are many countries that are logistically easier than the UK for German clubs. All the same, some do come over. And us being the world's oldest professional football club gives us a bit of curiosity value for German fans.

This is my topic! The Nuremberg sausages are lovely but they're too small to put on a roll. Thuringian ones are long and thin, sometimes the seller snaps them in half so they'll fit on your bread, then the mustard goes in the gap. I don't care who invented them, I'm just glad they exist. Can you tell I'm hungry?

It's pretty harsh to blame Maynard for not taking Jatta off, as far as I remember he wasn't even on a yellow. And can you imagine the outrage if he'd subbed him? As for the other point, too much is made of our data-driven approach sometimes. If we only looked at data, we'd never have appointed Paterson or Williams. I would hope someone is scouting our new players too!

I couldn't watch our annual League Cup run yesterday, so thanks everyone for commenting! During pre-season I had the impression that MP had opened a big jigsaw puzzle, the pieces had fallen all over the floor and he was trying to find the best way to fit them together. The jigsaw puzzle won't be finished for quite a few weeks yet. When Ian Burchnall switched to using wing backs, it was because we didn't really have enough wide players who were up to scratch. Now we have too many for the system we're playing, and the risk there is that members of the squad will end up too far away from the first 11 and will end up unhappy. Even if the Jones no. 10 experiment fails, if Jones is fit he should be playing. That leaves one other slot, and Bennetts also plays in his position. Would Bennetts really be happy with the supersub role he had at his previous clubs?

All good things come in three, so here's our third round (there are 43 rounds after this though, which spoils things a bit). Kick-off is 3pm and don't forget your joker! Preston North End v Leicester City Swansea City v Sheffield United Leyton Orient v Stockport County Reading v AFC Wimbledon Barnet v Walsall Tranmere Rovers v Gillingham Aldershot v Boston United Hartlepool United v Braintree Town

As we're underway in Germany too (apart from the Bundesliga) it's time for a little update! I'll start with the teams we played in pre-season. Darmstadt have enjoyed a good start to the season, winning both their opening games and scoring five goals in the process. Kaiserslautern lost their opening game but won their televised clash against Schalke thanks to a debatable penalty. I wasn't very impressed by them but it's early days. In the fourth-level Regionalliga Südwest, Stuttgarter Kickers have also won two out of two, including an impressive win against promotion favourites SV Sandhausen. So a positive start, but that league is a bit of a shark tank and only one team goes up. So all in the garden is rosy? Not quite. SV Waldhof Mannheim, i my view Germany's coolest club by far, have supplied plenty of drama and the parallels to Notts are unnerving sometimes. The club appointed a young coach six games before the end of last season and just about squeaked to third division safety. However, this coach (let's call him Dominik) was already under contract at another club as a youth coach from July onwards. Hence, Waldhof spent most of the summer in negotiations to release Dominik from his contract there (during which time barely a handful of players arrived) and ended up paying a transfer fee for him. A six-figure sum was rumoured; not bad for an under-19s coach. Two league games and one point later, Dominik had managed to fall out with the DoF, the club's best striker and the long-serving club captain (who departed) and was sacked. He was replaced by the head coach of the Luxembourg national team the following day. On the plus side, the solid goalkeeper they let go has been replaced by a tall Dutch bloke, so what could possibly go wrong?

Interesting stuff. Bringing it back to football somewhat, in the 19th century it was common to hand out "mourning cards" at people's funerals, commemorating the person who had died. As football was growing in popularity at that time, the inevitable happened and mourning cards were produced for football clubs after defeats for the purposes of Hilarious BanterTM.

This is good news, it's been sad to watch such a talented and entertaining player rotting on the bench. Now he finally has the chance to prove Pep wrong and show everyone what he can do. Maybe he could even use it as a stepping stone for a move back to Notts 😉 Everton move into their new stadium this year, they have a competent manager and are not short of a bob or two. This season will mark a fresh start for them, and Grealish is an exciting signing.

It's too early to tell. I think Saturday was more a case of us failing to implement it. From about the 70th minute onwards we did revert to something that looked like Maynardball. The fact that that was a vast improvement tells you all you need to know. I think it's legitimate to tweak and adapt our approach to the division we're in. We saw that last season with the return of the occasional long ball and direct corners. What we shouldn't do is completely turn everything upside down as we really weren't far off last season.

The results: Oxford United 0-1 Portsmouth Stoke City 3-1 Derby County Exeter City 4-1 Blackpool Mansfield Town 1-2 Doncaster Rovers Gillingham 1-0 Walsall Oldham Athletic 1-1 Colchester United Tamworth 1-2 Scunthorpe United Wealdstone 2-0 Truro City Here are this round's scores - congrats to @JustLikeJuve and @Robbie for winning this round with 13 points each, with @super_ram just behind on 12 - no mean feat after wasting his joker on Derby! Overall, @JustLikeJuve leapfrogs @magpiejue to go top, while defending champion @super_ram joints the top three. The blue numbers are last week's positions. The prediction league doesn't cover these new-fangled cup competitions, so the next round will be this coming Saturday. So expect to see the fixtures in the usual place on Wednesday. Thanks for playing!

What can you say about that? First thoughts: that was like watching the very worst of what we served up under Steve Thompson. What a huge step back from the last few seasons. Ok, it's early days, we've got a lot of new players and they need to settle in and develop an understanding. It won't happen overnight, but we also can't afford to let a quarter of the season pass us by before it magically clicks (if it ever does). We completely failed to deal with their high pressing because our passing was neither fast nor precise. How can it be when the players don't know where each other are and there are massive gaps between them? On a few occasions when we had the ball, our player had no choice but to run into a blind alley because no one else was showing for the ball. That's really worrying. We only really pepped up a bit in the last 20 minutes, when Salford started sitting a bit deeper. I think Grant helped us hold up the ball a bit more and sustain a bit of pressure, but even so we rarely looked like scoring. On the plus side, Bennetts looked a good player and never gave up even when we were struggling to get a foothold in the game. He could be an important signing. I agree with @Chris that Jones' tantrum after not getting a penalty (which would have been extremely harsh) was ridiculous, it makes him look like a toddler and he needs to cut it out. Unnecessary yellow cards like that lead to suspensions. I don't think Roos was to blame for the first goal. He stayed glued to his line for just about all crosses, he really made me nervous, but the corner would have been too far out. That's on the defence for losing their man. The second goal was a complete joke of course. I'm very nervous about this signing after having seen that. My feeling after seeing that is that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and gone backwards. I hope I'm wrong.

This is absolutely dire. We look like a team of strangers, nobody seems to know what they're supposed to be doing or where their team mates are.

@Michael D Pie. I'll have to check the rule book to make sure wizardry is allowed. Crystal balls should be fine though. Oxford United 1-2 Portsmouth Stoke City 1-1 Derby County Exeter City 1-0 Blackpool Mansfield Town 2-1 Doncaster Rovers Gillingham 0-1 Walsall Oldham Athletic 2-2 Colchester United Tamworth 0-2 Scunthorpe United Wealdstone 2-0 Truro City (joker)