The radio promised travel chaos. It didn't materialise. I am therefore in the car park at the Pirelli stadium nice and early. The most generic sounding euro dance music wafts from the stadium away to my right. Music aside, it would be difficult to tell if it's a football ground or the industrial estate headquarters of a firm specialising in logistics if it weren't for the floodlights.
The journey was uneventful. A lazy kestrel does not exist, but I saw one have a brief moment of CBA, taking off from a motorway light, circling round and sitting back down again in a way that seemed to say 'fuck it. That mouse can have 5 more minutes'
Closer inspection reveals the ground to be actually not as bad as it looked from a distance. There's terracing on three sides, an odd little inside bar in the away end and to get into one of the home stands you have to cross a river on a little bridge. I quite like it.
As I'm here unusually early, I watch the warm up. There's snoods aplenty amongst the players as they run out, even though I don't think it's actually that cold. Maybe they got them for Christmas from Neil and don't want to upset him by not wearing them. I watch the keepers. Grimmy actually yawns in the warm up, making a save and then letting out a big long lion style exhalation as he gets up.
I just don't want us to fuck up Christmas. A few days of just being moderately happy and on a level are nice. It's Boxing day, it's a decent away following. Burton have lost about their last 50 games in a row.
What could possibly go wrong?
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We make a slow start both literally and figuratively. We're pinned in by some pacy Burton aggression. This isn't the plan. Burton waste the pressure and we proceed to cruise about for a bit. We knock it about. All good. We're a lot better than them after all. Aren't we?
They're streaking down their right. One of their pacy and aggressive lads checks back and delivers a cross. Another pacy and aggressive lad runs towards it. Grimmy hesitates, the defender with him hesitates. The striker hesitates. Then everyone panics and throws themselves at a ball that's gone past them as it curls right into the bottom corner of the net. For fucks sake pool. For fucks sake. For fucks sake. Fucking fucks sake. Pool. For fucks sake. I had the perfect view of that and I'm going to give the high level tactical analytics viewpoints that it was a fucking typical fucking fuck up from us. Fucking hell. Fucks sake Pool.
At this point I'm going to introduce the ref and his team. Jimmy is stood, with his arms outstretched. He's just won a throw, except he hasn't because it's been given the other way. His eyes are bulging with disbelief, he's screeching 'How.. how? How? ... How?' and then once more for good measure... 'How???!'
It goes a bit like this all afternoon. We get nothing. That isn't to say we actually deserve anything from the game holistically but one linesman is like a bloke who wandered in from walking his dog and didn't expect to be running a line, the other one keeps getting over ruled by the ref and the ref is just fucking shit so the combination of the three of them is something to behold.
To be honest, trying to cobble together three paragraphs which aren't 'what the fuck was I thinking expecting anything other than abject and crushing disappointment?' is a challenge.
I can manage the following: At some point we get the ball to Rhodes. He belts it over. He's not really on it today. He seems tired or to be playing off his heels instead of the balls of his feet. Joseph hares around but can't hold the ball up. CJ isn't very ole' and Lyons is struggling to make an impression.
At least there's Karamoko. He doesn't really have that great a telling impact but he picks it up and runs like a dream to win a free kick on the edge of the box. Nothing comes of it, but for at least 10 seconds I had the pleasure of imagining a goal, which is nice. Maybe I could invent a new stat. Pwmyttmbagwtgtb*. Kaddy is +2.5. The rest of the team is about -3.
*Playerswhomakeyouthinktheremightbeagoalwhentheygettheball
All else I can remember apart from us being shit, the ref being shit and wondering why we're using a yellow ball when it's not snowy is Norburn banjoing one over the stand. At least he tried.
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We're poor. We look out paced at the back. The midfield can't get a grip, the ball won't stick up front and Grimmy is having a shaky day. Burton are compact and have an aggressive style. They've been the better team. They've certainly made better use of what they've got anyway...
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We start the second half by nearly conceding again. Well done everyone. It's too far away to really tell what happens but basically, the ball looks in, but then Grimmy emerges from a crowd of players clutching it.
Then suddenly, he wakes up. He hurls it long, Kaddy takes, touches it to CJ, CJ races forward. We're in. CJ falls over. His fall actually results in a better through ball than he manages all afternoon when upright, Rhodes takes over. He does everything but shoot when Dembele is screaming for it, unmarked and the chance is gone.
We attack a bit more, but we really don't convince. There's a very desperate shout for a penalty as Lyons is bundled over in a regulation shepherding out of play moment. I shout. I'm kind of ashamed of myself for doing so, so weak is the claim.
Dembele has another mazy run. He offloads to CJ. CJ seems a bit taken aback by having the ball, so he just gives it back to Dembele who, after using all his magic on the run, needs to recharge for a minute, so the ball just kind of bounces off him and rolls away.
Norburn lunges wildly. I'm convinced it's a red as it looked a bit like a scissor challenge, but it's only a yellow. We're already flailing unconvincingly, frustrated by a combination of our impotence, Burton's gamesmanship, the official's lack of will to do anything about it and the general unfairness of them being quite well organised.
Kaddy runs again. He finds Rhodes. Jordan appears to just break down in the box, running in a weird arc, not shooting or passing and looking, for the first time in a 'Pool shirt, slightly less than world class. Kyle Joseph has been the bright spark of the second half. He's struggled to get into the game, but just as he is starting to cause trouble with a few pacy runs and some really tigerish closing down, Critchley takes him off.
Some fireworks go off. The man behind me says 'there's no fireworks on the pitch' - sometimes this blog writes itself. It's a team effort.
Beesley takes over. We have a shout for handball after Bees makes a good run, but then fails to control the ball and it bounces around like mad on the edge of the box. We shout again as Lyons cuts inside and slaps the ball hard at a defender. That one looked more convincing. We hang a ball up to the edge of the box, CJ goes to head it back, but instead chests it back and Jimmy belts it over the top. I leap for the ball as it flies over my head. I miss.
Things are getting desperate. The keeper is chucking out textbook shithouse behaviour. We're getting edgy at the slow pace at which we move the ball. Burton are seemingly not fooled by us stringing it along the back line. Dale and Carey come on. Dale is innovative in the way he actually goes at his man a few times. Carey also notable for running forwards with the ball. It's Sonny's canny pass that puts Dale away that creates the next chance, another cross, another block.
We get 6 minutes injury time. We've resorted to counting the seconds out loud every time the keeper picks the ball up. At one point we reach 24. The ref isn't arsed. Luckily we don't throw anyone up front because that would be crazy stuff. We win a flurry of corners. Luckily, we don't load the box, or send Grimmy up or anything like that, because why would you do something so silly? We hit the bar but even then, it's not us, but one of their defenders and it's never that close anyway. The game ends with a corner and an uncontested take by the keeper. We wouldn't want to do anything daft like putting a man on the keeper for a corner. We've got to make sure we retain our shape you see.
Fuck's sake Pool.
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There's no way to dress this up. It was poor. We didn't compete, we didn't really make anything beyond a potshot or two and we looked languid, predictable and were utterly baffled by the fairly regulation challenge posted by Burton Albion who got into shape quickly and played aggressively and retained a bit of threat by having some muscular and pacy forwards. It's not exactly being beaten by tactical innovation. For fuck's sake, they had the actual real life Bez fucking Lubala as their main man. (Well done Bez.) For fucks sake.
I totally respect what Burton did today. I have no complaints. They aren't very good, they had, for example, several players who couldn't kick the ball very well. They executed a basic and effective game plan. It's not a dissimilar game plan to that which was used by Northampton, Cambridge, Port Vale, Exeter (and so on - you get the idea, we're shit against teams that play like that - i.e. the kind of football that a load of League 1 teams play)
I have absolutely no problem with us trying to play a certain way. In fact, I want us to have a 'style' and to work towards a defined set of roles. It's how you progress - by setting out a playing style and recruiting to a template and rinsing, repeating, improving each window. The first problem is that yes, when that style is suited to the game, we look very good, but when it isn't, we look pretty shit and in probably about half our games this season, we've looked lost. We neither moved the ball around to feet with pace and intent, nor played the channels with pace or aggression. We just, like quite a few other occasions, seemed to go into our shells and play little slow 5 yard passes across the back line, midfielders coming deep to join in, before eventually lumping it long anyway, long after Burton had marked everyone and then repeated the whole affair again. The second problem is, we seem unable to innovate within that style, let alone change actual shape at all. We have no positional fluidity, no sense that we can swap people round, change the match ups, try players on different feet and so on.
When we're poor, we look defeated after about 25 minutes of the game. We just don't seem to have the belief. We're like a pretty yacht that is made of balsa wood. It's all very nice and graceful in calm weather but as soon as the sea gets rough, we fall to bits.
I don't know if we don't have the belief to stick to plan A come what may or we don't actually have any convincing plan B but we've seen enough games this season where we fall into a kind of nothing state, between two stools, neither fish nor fowl, where we have a load of possession and are what Critchley would call in 'good areas' and we do next to fuck all with it as if we don't believe in ourselves at all. It's not losing that I object to, it happens. It's the manner of it, the fitful and flimsy manner of it that really irks.
Then, after I'd resolved to get home and forget about the shit show my car broke down and the nice warm team bus drove past me as the floodlights flickered out, leaving me stuck in the cold and dark for about 2 and half hours with only a nearly dead phone for company.
Fuck off football.
Onward
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