We went in a pub afterwards where they had plaques on the wall of ships that had sunk in Torquay.  I think we can add the good ship Welling United to the list.  Well and truly sunk today. Hope we can bounce back as a gap opening at the bottom now. 

I think Bloor took a gamble on this. From his perspective, if he puts Javern in goal and he had a stinker, most people would say he's too inexperienced and Bloor should have got a loanee in. In hindsight a poor decision.

I was interested to see the Boreham Wood manager say he had watched our 3 previous games, and knew what to expect as we played the same players in the same formation in each game. I understand why Danny is doing that, as his Welling team has just played 12 league games and 4 cup games, so players need to play together to build up understandings across the pitch, and that has improved as the season has gone on.

But the downside of that is that teams will know what to expect, and how to counteract us, if it is too predictable.

Danny has quite a defensive formation, with only 1 attacking player, which frees up a player to play in defence or midfield. As we dont have lots of striker options it has made sense to only play 1 in attack. But I wonder if now is the time to be more attacking in our formation, as I believe attack is the best form of defence, and play with 2 up front, Tristan and David, as it would mean we may concede more from having one less player in defence/ midfield, but would score more, and as long as one starts scoring more than one concedes the formation change could be beneficial. We have a run of bottom 6 teams coming up, these would be safer matches to try a more attacking formation, as I totally get why we havent against the higher teams, where 1 up front is safest, but against lower teams we can be more attacking. Like, we have bottom placed Havant, and 3rd from bottom Dover soon, and it would be criminal to play with only 1 up front against those sort of teams, as they are not such an attacking threat, so we dont need to be set up overly defensively. I will be asking Danny at the meet the manager meeting about playing 2 up front. I remember how changing our formation last season by starting to play Manny Parry as a holding midfielder transformed us, and it looks like we need another change to rebalance the team. In one of our recent games Alex came on, Tristan syayed one, and we had 2 strikers on, and having two attacking players really made an impact, as Alex had his best game, holding up the ball, bringing others in to attacks, so the rare time we have tried 2 strikers it has worked.

We are coming towards January, so presumably there will be some squad changes as some of our loans run out then. There is that saying madness is doing things the same way and expecting different outcomes, so with us now 5 points adrift it feels like we need to make some changes, as yes, the lack of an experienced striker really damaged us at the start of the season, but we have 11 league goalscorers, so the team as a whole are impressively doing their best to help fix the scoring issue. Thanks Graham, I am in the give Javarn more games camp, but a 1 match ban isn't too damaging.

Apologies if I am mistaken, but I believe the 1 match suspension for the two yellow cards will take effect next Saturday, so James Holden could play on Tuesday if Danny chooses to select him.

Chris wrote:

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 I still have confidence in Danny and believe he is the right man to turn this around, however, if we are still in the relegation zone come the end of November I think some difficult decisions will have to be made.

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 I agree with everything else you wrote but not this. If we get rid of Danny what do we do then?  Get in a new manager who will have no money to spend in the hope of staying up? And then get rid of him if we don't?

As long as our team are giving everything to the last I think we should stick with Bloor even if we are relegated. 

I actually think we will be alright but it might be close. Our last two games are Weymouth (H) and Slough (A)

 

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 I really like Danny, he comes across as a stand-up guy and his sides play very attractive football. I have every confidence that he will turn things around, however, we can't allow the club to sleepwalk towards relegation because we don't want the manager to lose his job. Were we to go down there is no guarantee we would come straight back up - even Dulwich with their massive crowds and an experienced manager are struggling and in recent years Whitehawk and East Thurrock have both been relegated back-to-back (and Concord look very likely to repeat that feat this season). Going down would shrink our already very small budget even further and I'd hate to think it could potentially hinder our development plans - which are already looking doubtful as to keep on schedule planning should have been put in a month ago. I couldn't possibly say who would be in line for the job should Danny get the boot, if it did happen I doubt it'd be for a while yet and a lot can happen in football in a couple of months so by that time more options will be available. We're debating hypotheticals though. I really believe he will turn things around though and I wouldn't be surprised if come the end of the season we are comfortably mid-table. We all need to keep the faith!

Success is relative in football. A quarter of the season in the headline is Danny has got us 5 points adrift of safety, which obviously looks bad. But actually, it could be argued that in the circumstances he has got us in a better position than most other managers could have with the same squad and finances, so definitely should be kept. We are actually similar in profile to Cheshunt, low crowds, not much money, they were relegated last season, but kept their manager Craig Edwards, as they could see he had done as well as anyone could with the limited resources he had. Same applies to Danny.

The hidden secret to the issues is we are clearly very tight for money this season after mismanaging our money last season, so Danny has to use a smaller, cheaper squad than he would doubtless have preferred. The difference in our finances is most clear in attack, last season we could afford to sign proven experienced strikers Ade Azzez and Stefan Payne for the season, and their goals kept us up by 10 points. This year we started with a cheaper attack of young inexperienced striker Alex on loan to us until January, and a 17 year old youth player who was also inexperienced in our league, and in this league you cant expect to be successful with an attack like that, so our pre Tristan results are no surprise. It worries me though that Tristan may be overloaded, and then we will be back to square one, so some rotation with him may be good.

I have heard our budget this season is 50% of last season's.  Warren told me the owner Howard Prosser had lost interest in the club now that Warren has gone, and it is clear there is less player investment this season. I think more attention needs to be directed on Howard, and less on Danny, as Danny's 3 top 8 finishes in a row show what he can do with the right tools, so it is up to the board to pull together and invest in attacking players.