One man team?
The phrase gets used quite a bit, fairly frequently nowadays at Macc. Last season at times it was either Jon Parkin scored or the team didn’t as a whole. When you think about it though, the way we played most of the time was to play every attack through the big man, hoping for him to spread the play or knock in down to someone. Such a strategy is surely going to yield a lot of goals for Parkin himself, and with him still injured, we seem lost.
Playing that style just doesn’t work without him and although we seem to be able to play good football at times, those times just don’t occur often enough. At the moment the only time we look like scoring is when Martin Bullock has the ball at his feet running at the defence. The other week he terrorised the Boston defence but he can’t be asked to be our only creativity for 90 minutes every week.
So we again lost away without managing to score, and even though from what I’ve seen Russell was unlucky in hitting the post, no goals in seven games isn’t great for a striker.
Flashback to last season and at the same stage our strikers had scored 8 between them, Tipton 2 and Parkin 6. So far this season only Kevin Townson has hit the net twice, one of them being in the Carling Cup.
The strange thing is though that it’s the defence that’s letting us down more than anything. Despite being the same back 4/5 as last season apart from Potter leaving, we are conceding goals far too much, and mainly from set pieces.
Will things be all rosey again in a few weeks with BJP back then? Well so far the midfield has been the only positive, Martin Bullock seems to be a brilliant acquisition and Danny Whit looks nearly back to his best of a few years ago, so hopefully the answer will be yes. Losing someone who scored 26 goals the previous season would be a huge blow to any team, let’s just hope it wasn’t a one season wonder. And even if we are in some ways a one man team, he is quite a big one man!
That’s enough of my pessimism for the moment, I’m predicting us to win tonight. So far this season I’ve been scarily right on most occasions so I reckon if I say Macc will win then they will…Well it’s better than superstitious lucky pants surely!
posted by Andy at 5:36 PM
5 Comments:
Liechtenstein have always been my foreign country of choice. That 'Stamping Grounds' book was my inspiration too. Excellent post. Would have filled in the comments box below the relevant post but it's full of bastard spam.
Will link to your site from mine, Hobo Tread - http://hobotread.blogspot.com.
This is certainly more in keeping with my lower league fascination.
Best wishes.
Warm my Big Macc up its getting cold. Come on Andrew, stop slacking and get cracking!
Going to link you onto my site - if you want to do the same feel free (bitterandblue.blogspot.com).
Cheers.
When I came up last season I thought that your two best players on the pitch were Parkin and Potter. Parkin was the onlyt hreat to our back line and it was no surprise when he made the goal as his free kick hit the post before the rebound was tucked in.
Potter looked very assured in both 5-3-2 and 4-4-2 formations. Seemed confident on the ball and strong in the air.
If you're missing these two, I'm not surprised it's been a lot more of a struggle. When speaking to a Macc fan who's a mate of mine though, we were saying that you have to get promoted when you have a good season because you may be waiting some time for another one and that seems to be the case
Good luck for the rest of the season. After our game, I have pretty fond memories of Macc!
PS
(Southend fan)
Hi there,
Sorry to leave this as a comment but I couldn’t find your contact details.
You may remember we contacted you a while ago about a football blog community we are setting up, asking if you or any of your readers would be interested in writing for us?
Well, I thought I’d let you know that we launched the website on Friday with 6 football fan weblogs initially.
The site is at www.reallifenews.com.
I’d be grateful if you could let your readers know we have launched and that we are still looking for fans to write about other teams and football topics.
Cheers
DavidM
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