0-1 Half Time

Deary me!

Long second half of season coming

We need to be winning these games at home against teams around us...still time to score a couple but...

Muwange on for Tanga

Why oh why do we always give better performances/ get better results against top sides than we do against sides around us in the league table? Their keeper did well, but we should at least have scored once. Two matches v Dartford ahead we must get at least 4 points out of those or the dreaded drop will be hard to avoid

That was an important game today against an evenly matched team. We were average but it seemed to me that the referee was not arsed with doing his job. In contrast to last week when the female referee correctly placed out and marked 10 yards for a free kick this referee didn't seem all that fussed. He should have booked an Eastbourne player in the 2nd minute of the game for a shockingly late challenge and the Sports saw that as a gree light to do that for the rest of the game. Then we had a tight offside against us as well as two potential penalties given just outside the box, both times without consulting the assistant and then a handball waved away. Tanga and  Muwonge also missed good chances.

Despite that we started to slow.

Never mind. Must be better next week and against Dirtford. 

Lets be honest, following our form in the West Country, along with today, Bath City must be a nailed on banker.
See you on the 23rd.

Im struggling to know what I feel after watching that Im sorry im starting to lose faith now. Possession and time spent in the opposition half must of been off the scale. Shots on goal. On and off target Christ knows how many. Open goals missed probably two. But the only stat that matters is Welling Utd 0 Langley Sports 2. Oh for a clean sheet. We all know we will concede at least a goal a game. That means to win we will need to score at least 2 goals a game. Trouble is we dont score that many goals either. We almost always outplay the opposition but very rarely win. We beat the runaway leaders of the league, sorry battered the runaway leaders of the league a couple of weeks back. That bonus win now means nothing coz we lost to a very poor Langley Sports team. Their best player was the Yellow card. How many yellows did they get? 7 or 8 probably. Their players celebrated like they had just won the champions league FFS. They knew they had nicked the points coz we arent ruthless or probably not able to win games we dominate.
We now face Bath away. We will probably do our usual West Country thing and get battered by a few goals but play well. Then its Fartford. We will play well but lose both games. They will keep a clean sheet in both games and we will not. But we will probably play well. If these players dont step up right now and thats starting from the Bath away game we are Fkd well and truly. The honeymoon is over. I want positive results now. Dont disappoint please.

-- Edited by Riverstown on Saturday 16th of December 2023 08:04:43 PM

Really disappointing today. Started well but never took our chances in the first half.  Surprised we didn't pounce more on the keeper as each save was parried out or sideways. At times we went sideways or backwards and I thought we missed Chambers who looked for those sort of progressive passes. The ref was an abomination. Looking forward to Eastbourne's open top bus parade, which I believe Sky Sports are covering 

 

Not good enough today and we are in a dog fight this season. However, we have one of the lowest budgets in the league and it isnt on Danny. Anyone who was in the bar tonight will know how good he is for us. I sense it will be a tough season but lets dig in!

I think there is this abstract thing called football intelligence, where you learn from mistakes, so stop making them. I just dont see much football intelligence in the way we set out our attacking options. A fairly tried and tested common approach in football is to play attacking at home and play for the win, and to set up more defensively in away games and be more prepared for a draw. And if one is playing a strong team set up defensively, and if one is playing a weaker team play with a more attacking formation.

Yet we dont do any of that, we have a very tactically inflexible manager, who pretty much always plays the same formation home and away irrespective of the standard of the opposition, always one guy up front. Yesterday we were at home against Eastbourne, a bottom 4 team, and instead of pressuring them we only played one up front. They must have been laughing their heads off at how cautious we were and how little threat we could offer with one up front. When we were 2 goals down we finally played 2 up front for the last half hour, and had about 6 chances in that time. So being more attacking in the formation works so clearly, but it is pointless only doing that when we are behind, after the damage of setting up too defensively has been done, far better to start off with 2 up front, maybe later on take one off to switch to a more defensive formation to protect a lead, or keep both on as attack is the best form of defence, and they hardly threatened us when we put them under pressure with 2 up front for the last half hour.

We have been bottom 4 all season long, and once again as I walked out of the ground I heard Welling fans incorrectly telling the players that we will get there. But the table doesnt lie, what we are doing isnt working well enough to keep us safe with lots of wins, so the manager needs to go into the tank to work out what changes are needed to get more goals and wins. There was a moment in the match that summed up the benefit of 2 strikers, late on Tristan chased a ball to the corner. Now if he was the lone striker that would have meant we had no one left in an attacking position. But Adam was also on the pitch, so we still had an attacking shape for Tristan to link with. It is sad that this team keeps making the same mistake all season long and that the coaching staff can't see that a change in formation is needed, as the current one stuck to for half a season is not working well enough to get us the wins we need to get us up the table.

Danny made a snotty comment about Tristan not scoring more from open play, and missed seeing that Tristan hardly gets any supply in open play to score from. He needs someone up with him to give him more supply in attacking positions. It is all a repeat of Warren, who also played overly defensively with one up front, and also didnt have a plan B, a manager also puzzled why we draw so often, and not realising if you are set up overly defensively you wont concede much, wont score much, so draws are very likely, and wins are unlikely, hence us only having 4 wins from 22 league games. We need a plan B, more in attack.

I do agree our consistency is a real problem. I didnt think Eastbourne offered much and should have been there for the taking. I dont think we played well at all though and can have no complaints. We lacked our usual tempo and attacking threat. I think if we were still there now we wouldnt have scored. That was the worst Ive seen Grant play since he arrived and Paps is one of the most frustrating players ever. Im even less of a fan of Josh chambers too but we was certainly missing something in that position today. Kain Adom gets better every week and I think we might struggle to keep hold of him. I think him and Tanga are so effective when they isolate the opposition full backs and we didnt do it enough. Adom had two of their right backs for breakfast but I dont think we moved the ball anywhere near quick enough to isolate them, certainly second half. I also think were missing Lema who was excellent before his latest injury. Maybe naively I still believe that have enough to stay up but we need more of the good days than the rubbish from yesterday. Hopefully we can put that behind us and start to move up the table in the new year.

Given the way Eastbourne as a club conducted themselves yesterday Ill be delighted if they were to go down.

Our position would be higher if we had VAR, as we have had all sorts of wrong decisions against us that VAR, much as I dislike it, would have overturned, penalties, wrong sending off, disallowed goals... A problem that keeps affecting us unfairly is lines men keep calling us offside when say player A passes to player B who starts off on an onside position, and then gets the ball ahead of the last defender, and the lines men only look that player B got the ball with just the keeper ahead, and miss that our player was onside at the moment the ball was passed to him. We've had several goals incorrectly disallowed like that this season, yesterday being just the latest example. But it was the first home defeat since September, the worst home game for months, but I guess that is football, as I remember thinking before Brackley it would be just like us to qualify against Brackley in the cup then lose to Eastbourne in our next match. We need roughly 30 points from our remaining 24 games.


The match atmosphere was great with all the excited kids watching. I was talking to my kid about him playing for Welling one day, and it was nice when he said, "that is the dream", and it is great all the kids watching get to see a real game, maybe even playing for one of our teams in due course, so great community engagement.

MarkX wrote:

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So...we need to win 10....when we have won 4 do far!

Yes I know draws will come into it but is a big ask

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 History can't be changed but ten wins in twenty-four games doesn't sound like an impossible task.

Not impossible of course but nothing we have seen before points to it happenning

Hi Alan, I think there is a flaw in your reasoning. The first half of the season is not an accurate way to base the prediction for the second half, as the first half had a dreadful start as our attack was totally ineffective for this level of football, so playing with inexperienced 17 year old David Kamara or barely more experienced Alex as our attack was ridiculous.

Kain and Tristan have really stepped into their roles, Tristan wasnt with us at the start of the season, and Kain had to work his way into the team, but and we are light years better off than before they became fixtures in the team. So hopefully the second half will be a big improvement on the first half.

As I see it, we need to average a win, a draw and a loss from every 3 games for the rest of the season, and that would be enough to keep us up. But I am losing faith in us getting them, as we are so tactically limited as the whole coaching team sings from the same hymn book and clearly has no belief in playing more than one striker at a time, even though nearly every team that has ever been successful in football play with more than one guy in attack. The pay off for the coaches blinkered view is that Kain, who has been one of our top scorers, was deep and wide on Saturday, hardly involved in the game. So I am starting to doubt we can get the wins we need to stay up, because there is not much creative thinking going on how we can shuffle our team around. I may be wrong on this, but I think at the half way stage only Kain and Tristan have scored more than 2 goals, and that reflects the lack of attention on shooting, as Jephte should be scoring much more, Antony should be, Dominic too, and others. I am too far away from training to know where the buck lies, is it that the players are being given the right striking coaching, but arent taking the messages in, in which case the buck lies with the players, or is it that they arent being given the necessary striking coaching, as our inaccuracy against Eastbourne has been going on ever since pre-season.

Alex Ferguson advised a manager,

'you're trying to make bad players into good players. if they're drinkers, they're always drinkers 'if they're bad pros, they're always bad, get rid of them'.

So bloody wise and accurate, certain of our players have had their chances, time to bring in guys on the pitch who actually learn from mistakes instead of not learning from them so constantly repeating them.

I did say mine was an assumption on the 1st half of the season and included beating Bath away on Saturday and that is a big IF. We will probably need 50 points to stay in National League South so FACT we have 20 points from 22 games played so we need 30 points from the next 24 games I can't see us doing it.  Maybe 10 wins 14 losses Maybe 8 wind 6 draws 10 losses Maybe 3 wins 21 draws. I don't care how but I want to be wrong and Welling United stay up  

 

We seems to always play 4-5-1, I like 4-4-2..............call me Mike Bassett. The current popular formation is 4-2-1-3 . So if we played that then I guess Odusanya & Grant holding. Paps attacking midfield with Tanga and Adom much further forward and wide with Abrahams down the middle. I do wonder if Kain Adom could be the No. 10 attacking centrally from midfield though