The night is... sultry? Maybe not quite, but I've been driving around shit bits of the North West (hello Horwich) all day and it's been pissing down and grim, so to head out towards the gold coast with a sunset burning in the distance, uplighting the high cloud, giving it a dramatic quality against the horizon's clear light and casting the trees into a gorgeous two dimensional autumnal silhouette is nice.
Past Forton services and I glance as I often do at the tower. It's mobbed by hundred of birds, perched on the railings. Yesterdays tomorrow's future is today's rookery it seems. I'm calm. I usually listen to some kind of racket on the way to the football, but today, I've gone for some more mellow fayre. I'm not sure why. I think it's because it's nailed on that we're going to roll them over without needing to get out of 2nd gear so I don't need to work myself up into a warlike frenzy.
The team that put Oxford under the cosh for half an hour can't fail to get past the leakiest, least potent side this division has seen in ages can it?
I pull up. I check the team.
WHERE THE FUCK IS JIMMY HUSBAND?
EVERYBODY... PANIC!
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Cheltenham's kit reminds me of the sort worn by Swiss lower league sides. The kind that you see a clip of playing on some mountainside pitch against big teams on a low key European jaunt in preseason. The sort of side that loses 14-0 to Bayern Munich. It looks like they bought it from the M+M Sport Catalogue. Their manager has vibes of an early 90s fella who owns a petrol station on an A road so it's possible he got them in a job lot off the back of a lorry from one of the drivers he knows that doesn't mind a box a or two falling off his truck in exchange for £50 note. From my distance (quite a long way away) the fella looks a little bit like he's been drawn to adorn the box of an Amiga 500 football management game with the stress of football management indicated by his stubble and his role signified by the throwback padded sports coat he's wearing.
We're fairly quickly on top. A flash across the box and no one gets a touch. A touched off free kick and a fucking gorgeous ball from Dembele and Connolly diving and poking it wide. Dembele, clean through and hitting it hard, lifting it over the keeper and smashing it against the bar.
They're not very good. In fact, it looks very much as if all you need to do is run at them in a determined way and they'll step out of the way and let you through.
Just long enough passes for it to get a bit frustrating. Then CJ. Total football genius CJ Hamilton takes the ball down and (yes, this happened, you can check the video) switches play with a lovely bit of vision and pinpoint accurate technique (no, really, he did!) Thommo takes it down and just when it looks like he's over cooked his attempt to get by their covering man pulls out an actual ridiculously well executed Cruyff turn type thing, putting his foot on the ball and spinning into space before standing it up to the far post (again, this isn't a dream) where Rhodes nods it square and Lavery can't miss with a stooping header from about two yarrds out.
That's better.
It's not long before we score again. Morgan lines up a free kick but hits the first man in the wall. The ball takes a cruel deflection, cruel, specifically because it goes near Jordan Rhodes somewhere in the box and with the reactions of... I don't actually know of anything that reacts quicker than Jordan Rhodes in the box, so this metaphor will have to end here... Rhodes flicks his neck muscles and pullets the ball into the bottom corner. Cheltenham protest that it's not fair having to play against a world class centre forward in League 1 and ask the linesman to flag to makes things a little more equal but he's unmoved and Rhodes is leaping in the corner again.
Lavery is making their defence pretty terrified with some really good running. Dembele gets a round of applause for killing a high ball dead in the middle of the pitch with a kind of skill that makes you wonder what the fuck he's doing in this league. CJ earns a terrific round of applause for chasing, and chasing and stumbling, getting up and launching himself full length and almost taking it off the keeper. What a thing self belief is. Connolly repeats the feat of almost scoring at the far post with another full length dive.
We look as if we could score at will to be honest. The third though, is again down, again, in huge part to CJ. We turn defence to attack and the effort he makes to get from full back to being the furthest forward is sensational, full on sprinting 50 yards and running on to a well weighted ball to the edge of the box. His pull back is hacked away, Morgan tosses it hopefully back in and Dembele takes it on his chest and shapes to shoot, I think... he's stumbled... but in fact, as he falls away, he arrows a perfect effort into the bottom corner and I celebrate with the special relish that comes with a class player scoring a really good goal.
That's that then.
Except, this is Blackpool. So of course it isn't.
Late in the first half, they lump it forward. It's the wrong end for me, so I can't see very well but it looks like Casey is beaten in the air and can't get the right side of his man. The knockdown is followed in by the same player and the other defender (Connolly) chucks himself but all too late and the ball is tucked beyond Grimmy with a nice finish. This may not be an accurate recounting (you don't not pay me for facts though, so fuck off and watch the video) but the general sense of it being a slightly careless, quite piss easy goal to concede is generally accurate I think. I imagine Critch will be hopping mad.
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We've twatted them. The goal doesn't matter. Lets go and get three more. We can do that. Then, they can score 4 more and we'll still win.
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It appears the above was not the halftime message. Cheltenham bring almost as many subs on as they brought fans and we're seemingly uninterested in carrying on with the sexy football stuff. This half is a real struggle to write about. Nothing happened. I counted the away fans and got to 'about 65' but was told someone else in the row had counted them and got to '91'
Cheltenham don't really cause very much trouble. They have quite a lot of possession but we're comfortable enough. We just don't seem to have the penetration we had in the first half at all. The composure has gone. Dougall is having a grand game again though. So, is Thommo to be fair. Just as I decide to make my thoughts vocal, he falls over, gives the ball away and then shanks the resulting clearance. Good ol' Thommo. CJ may now be way better than Ronaldo (the weird oily sex pest one, not the funny looking Brazilian lad) ever was but Thommo hasn't quite fully levelled up yet.
Grimmy makes a good stop to one that was offside anyway and get a ball in the groin for his efforts. CJ continues to torment them, one run in particular making me laugh as he just runs, stops, and runs again and the merest hint of trickery has their full back back peddling so quickly, he effectively runs away from Hamilton, giving him freedom.
Dembele has been afforded a lot of freedom tonight and used it well. He makes way for Carey. Lavery has been waspish but lost his sting second half so the big grizzly bear that is Kouassi comes on in his place.
We come close to a fourth as Carey (who is neat and tidy and playing more conventionally than Dembele) strike one from the edge of the box that is flying in but is deflected over the top to form what I make now 'part 5 or 6 in the frustrating series of 'really good goals that Sonny hasn't quite scored this season'
Weir comes on for Morgan who has done ok but is also fading a bit and is, well, a bit wild. I'm not sure playing the deeper role suits him. Does it matter though? We're cruising. This is like a training exercise where the first team tease the youth team by letting them attack as much as they want and stop them scoring because they can.
Oh, for FUCKS SAKE Pool! They've just scored again. It was another piss easy goal, a lofted ball, a flick on and a player bundling it home via Grimmy's knee at the far post. Sometimes when another team score, you panic before the goal goes in, but this just happens and we seem to have watched it happen.
Step forward, Kylian. We've missed having a big nasty lad up front to time waste and the boy adds this skill to his list of reasons to love him. He's been totally ill served by the ref who seems to think if he wins the ball it's a foul and if they jump on his back, it's fine cos he's big and being big is reason enough to punish him for it, but he takes the ball in, turns and then pulls out the most outrageously ridiculous bit of late games skill to gallop down the left flank in a series of shimmies, step overs and a weird kind of donkey style air kick, the like of which I've literally never seen before and gets a corner.
Cheltenham can't rouse themselves for another attack. We've finally decided to kill the game properly. The whistle goes. Relief. The fist pumping feels a bit tinpot tonight but there we go.
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I don't know really how to finish this. We were excellent, then we were, well, nothingy to the point of ridiculousness. We definitely missed some players today - Husband for one, Norburn for another. It's a moot point whether the midfield 3 in the first half were more effective for the lack of a proper holding player (meaning they took turns to go forward and were therefore more fluid), but it's not a debate that we missed him in the second half when we just couldn't seem to take control of the play at all. Husband has been immense and I think we missed his consistency in the air and positioning (I think both their goals had questions over them) and we also very much missed how he drives us out from the back and joins in with the midfield/wide play.
I don't know if the players cruised, or Critchley felt we could conserve energy and pick them off as they went forward second half, but whichever it was, it was a bit too close for comfort and we missed the chance to really turn the screw on a team and, whilst Cheltenham deserve a lot of credit for not folding and making a game of it, they looked to be as limited as anyone we've played so far, though that said, I thought their 9 gave Casey as difficult a night as he's had for us this year.
It's 3 points though. Better teams would punish us for a tepid second half, but then, we'd be unlikely to have strolled to a 3-0 advantage and got complacent against those better teams, so I think that's probably just one of those things people say for the sake of saying something. I'm starting to think this team isn't so much like Critchley's previous sides who were best on the break. We're actually not very convincing when we try to be passive and then explode and pick teams off. We're far better when we play with genuine intent and look for openings.
The question now is not so much 'how do we break sides down' but how do we react to having key players out against decent sides?
Onward!
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