A jigsaw with no picture...

'Dunney - how about this... give it to Feeney, he crosses it and the big lads jump? Either that or 2-3-1-2-1-1 with the goalie off Big Gary and Jay between the sticks? 

Once upon a time (in a far off land called about 6 weeks ago), when things were good and the Pool were riding high in League One,  it looked as if Larry had hit on a fairly reliable formula.

Even then, there were doubts and doubters. Not all were entirely taken with how one dimensional we seemed, reliant on a steady but predictable route for goals, working the ball wide to Feeney who whipped it in for Gnanduillet. We seemed to be playing with an imbalanced set up said the doom laden pessimists and would get found out. The optimistic fools countered by saying what we lacked in left sided width, we made up for in pace, strength and guile with Fonz, Kaikai (remember him?) and big Armand seeming good enough to give most sides something to think about.

There's little doubt that early in the season, in some games, most notably Oxford at home, we picked up results that didn't really reflect the performances. Some saw this as a sign of the shortcomings of the side, others would see it as testament to Larry's ability to get a result where it mattered.

A little unambitious Bolton shaped blip was ironed out with what was, in my mind, the best performance of the year against Peterborough, where Callum Macdonald seemed to give us hitherto unseen options. We could pass left! We could pass right! We could even occasionally run down the middle! Things were going ok. Fleetwood (amongst others) were dispatched with a minimum of fuss. Larry even showed a bit of swagger in an interview, stopping short of outright dissing Joey Barton as 'a faux intellect in a truckers cap, who manages a jumped up Sunday league side, who got his arse handed to him by a tactical masterclass in both football and playing the media' but seemed to be going someway to re-endearing himself to the tangerine masses by kind of intimating as much.

Matty Virtue finding a Premier League goal to suit the Premier League ground at Sunderland was the last really exciting thing to happen in the league. Christmas was more disappointing than it had any right to be. A decent performance away at Reading in the cup offered a flicker of hope but was followed by a really flat home display.

8 games slipped by with just 2 draws to show for it and a grand total of 1 league point.

What went wrong?

Here's a theory.

Perhaps Grayson has shared the misgivings that some fans had earlier in the season about the flawed nature of the squad. But... maybe he's been briefed to give the players he inherited a chance and early on found a formula that worked well enough and he seemed to be getting a lot out of some previously inconsistent and/or limited players. This has to be to his credit to a certain extent as Feeney has never looked as good, Armand scored his career record by Christmas and Fonz seemed for about a month to be the player that Fonz always could be but never is.

I don't think 'Be tough and rugged then give it to Feeney, he'll put it on Armand's head' was a tactic that Grayson especially wanted to play, but early on he was smart enough to realise that it was probably the logical way to go with a squad that wasn't endowed with super silky skills and also not stupid enough to know that it wouldn't get found out in the long run.

There are signs that he's been trying to find a different way to set up and has been willing to use different combinations of players in the search for a different formula. There have been games, where Larry has changed the players around during the game, where we've switched formations and made subs and seen little impact. To an extent, Larry's tactical issues have seemed down to the players not really being able to adjust to anything outside plan A.

What Larry can't really be blamed for (...if we accept the admittedly entirely made up but feasible idea his brief was to 'give the squad a chance....') is the lack of creativity in the middle - time and time again, we've come up against stubborn sides (the likes of Shrewsbury, Rotherham, Accrington) who don't concede easily and can match big strikers with just as big or bigger defenders and have a simple but direct plan and had no answer.

What he can be questioned about is despite giving plenty of game time to most of the squad, is his strange aversion to playing Hardie and Macdonald (who brought balance and pace to a slow imbalanced line up) and his unwillingness to give our homegrown young players more than a few minutes in a non competition. What has to be said in his defence, is up until Christmas, that his choices seemed to be bringing results and the players showed spirit. Most games seemed to have 20-ish minute patch where we looked like we could really play a bit and the main concern was that those patches didn't last.

Christmas has changed that and we've seen some quite uninspired displays where we've really struggled against sides that haven't offered much themselves. The concern has grown from 'we aren't bossing games' to 'we were shit, Larry is shit, everyone is shit'

Come January and we've seen a slew of signings but performances haven't improved yet. It has to be said, we've seen more signings in January than you'd see in a fair few summers. When you look at the side, it feels a bit like Larry doesn't really know what to do with them. The Wycombe first half was really incoherent. It looked like a bunch of players who didn't know where each other would be.

Grant Ward ran up and down in the middle like the middle was the wing. Fonz seemed to be glued to the right touchline with Bola playing in a strange hinterland between full back and winger that suggested he wasn't sure whether to stick or twist. The two centre halves both made mistakes and the back four as a whole seemed unfamiliar with each other. Nuttall was Nuttall was Nuttall and Gary Madine must have baffled as to why no one had come up with the idea of crossing the ball to him.

In the second half, we hit on the madcap idea of bringing an actual winger on to the widest pitch in the league and we looked dangerous for a period.

The question is, do we blame Larry for trying something different? The decision to start with 2 strikers, the very tricky young kid, Fonz and Ward and Bola pushing on seemed to show intent. The way we set up seemed to suggest Larry felt he could hurt Wycombe, that we could actually attack.

The fact we couldn't and didn't doesn't suggest that there wasn't intent on his behalf. This wasn't Bolton, where a lack of adventure seemed apparent. This was a side that actually looked quite forward thinking on paper. He also went a bit crazy and played some of the players he'd signed! Larry! Calm down!

It just didn't work.

Were there signs of hope? Maybe. To say that isn't to deny the flaws that were clearly evident. A diamond is still a diamond whether it's on the finger of a beautiful model or in a cowpat.

Ronan looked like the sort of player our midfield is begging for, Madine has a couple of brief moments where he looked class, Dewsbury-Hall was an absolute bundle of energy and though I was a bit concerned he was slightly headless, he shut my doubts up by scoring. Nuttall missed two good chances but (and I'm really stretching it here) his movement in the last 20 minutes was very good, drifting across the box, finding pockets of space and at least he was closer to scoring. Aside from an early mistake, Thorniley looked tidy enough. Grant Ward at least didn't look crocked and has pedigree and showed one moment of outrageous control killing a high ball. Feeney hasn't been great recently, but in his 20 minutes had his full back on toast and put some decent crosses in.

Yes, that's a bit desperate, but what do you want? Me to put my head in the oven and leave a note saying 'Joe was offside again, couldn't face anymore....'?

Can Larry work something out with this lot? I don't know. There's promise but there's also questions. Why didn't we play till the last twenty minutes. Why did we jog gently into position when we had three absolute units up front that seemed ideal for Mark Howard to launch it at quickly. The selection was proved wrong, but I'm not going to crucify Larry for that - as I thought it showed some ambition and he's frustrated me previously on that front. What concerned me more was that we didn't show urgency, energy, a willingness to go toe to toe with a side that have climbed the table through those exact qualities.

I still think the striking position is odd. Madine and Gnanders? Strange mix. Madine and Nuttall. Hmmm. If Super Gnando is off elsewhere, then we really need a pacy striker who will hustle and bustle and run channels and there isn't one in the squad. Either that or we need to relearn how to get Fonz and KaiKai playing off Madine because Joe Nuttall isn't the answer. He might be one day. I live in permanent hope. I will not give up on him, (till he signs for Morecambe.)

Signing Husband permanently also seems an odd call. He's a good left back and he's got a brilliant attitude, but we don't really play with full backs most of the time. Bola and Macdonald are both superior going forward but inferior to him defensively. He deserves a medal for the running he's done this year up and down the flank on his. He's slotted into a back three before and looked ok, but seemingly that slot is covered by Thorniley. It's odd to have signed him permanently at just the point it seems we've signed two players to fill the positions he could fill.

Then there's the thorny question of whether Jay Spearing is a football god who can do no wrong or just a terrier who slipped his leash and jumped the hoardings and likes to run around biting at the ankles of the opposition, barking and having little discernable impact. I think the answer is neither. I think he's a very good player, but one who if we are serious about promotion, we need to be thinking about rotating in some games for either a more creative player or a player with more physical presence. If you're going to play a small player in midfield in League One, it usually means that they're skilful - Spearing has many qualities, but dribbling and passing in an attacking way are not his game.

I'm not sure the signings address this point of balance in midfield physicality and Spearing seems still the lynchpin come what may. Ronan looks good, but he's smaller than even Spearing and unless we're total footballing now and I've missed the Ajax masterclass the players all attended (and if so, why did we have a floodlight pylon's worth of height up front) then I'm not sure that midfield pair has presence enough and I'm not sure we can afford to leave a player of Ronan's obvious intent out when we've scored so few goals.

Ultimately, I think we've signed some really good players, who either impressed in a poor display, or come with real pedigree and we should give them a chance. What I can't see is how the pieces go together. Perhaps Larry can. I hope so. I'm starting to have some doubts, but I've been proved wrong before and I also think if I can't see how the pieces go together, someone else coming in would struggle to work it out. Larry has put this squad together and I think he has to be the man to try to get a tune out of it. It's got potential and suddenly, it's quite hard to guess how we'll line up or how we'll play. Sometimes that's a sign that the manager has lost the plot and is flailing wildly, sometimes it's a point of change and you find the moment where it clicks into place.

In Larry we grimly place uncertain hope because we're idiots in love with a stupid team that almost always lets us down but we love them to death anyway because what else would we do? 

UTMP