Wednesday 11th August
Swindon Town 2-3 Luton Town
At this rate, I’m going to have to get my lucky socks out again in a bid to kickstart the season.
The lethargy of Wrexham seems to have slipped into the first home game, and the locals aren’t happy. But you have to apportion some of the blame, again, to the referee. What is it with refs and Luton games? It was nice to be back at home with a big crowd and some atmosphere ringing in my ears. I miss the buzz of the stadium – the togetherness of it all. And the moment the ‘dodgy’ penalty was awarded they all sang together and gave the ref a great deal of grief. The trouble is, really their goal had been coming. If it hadn’t been the penalty, it would have gone in some other way. The crowd stood up and defended the team, but Luton had already hit the post. We were riding our luck. Giving Luton too much opportunity to play. Too much space. Not getting in for second balls. Being lazy. And that only ever has one end result. I’m not going to lie, the first half was a shambles of epic proportions. But what makes the loss even more hard to take is what followed. The second half was like Swindon were the last 11 Englishmen defending the country from invasion. They were the last line of defence. It was war. Most of them played out of their skins – although there were notable exceptions, which I’ll come to in a moment. Howard, Migs, Parkin, Reeves and Hewlett for me had great second halfs. The rest, quite frankly, should be ashamed of themselves. Andy Gurney in particular had an utterly dreadful game, closely followed by Daisy Duke on the shocker list. What the hell has happened to Daisy? He played the best game I’ve ever seen from him against Saints, and played like a total tosser tonight. Mazy runs across the pitch? More like don’t have a clue what the hell he’s doing. And those mistakes are creeping in elsewhere too. Sean O’Hanlon made a few, and Duke was at fault for one of the goals too. You can’t really blame Reeves for colliding with Dukey – he’d strayed out of position anyway. And Sammy Igoe. Sammy, if you get the ball, you are good enough a player to run with it. Don’t stand there like a lemon and wait for the perfect pass to open in front of you, like Moses and the Red Sea. RUN! The team were encouraged and cheered on as sparks of the previous season flew on the pitch – but the game slipped away thanks to a deft managerial moment. Triple substitution, take your time lads. Inspired. So what can Kingy do? He’s got no players to replace the rubbish that was on display tonight. The board have only just released cash to him – why on Earth did they not do that two months ago when the decent players were looking for clubs? I don’t envy him. You could almost argue that the performance tonight wasn’t the only shambles recently at the club. Stadiums, ex-players’ contracts, money, loans … you name it, we’ve been there and screwed it up of late. How much longer can this go on? When will we get someone from Spurs, and how the hell did we sign Leigh Mills’ contract and manage to get ‘best endeavours’ and not guarantees? Naive? You betcha. We can only hope that Nico and Ifil’s comebacks help gee the team up a bit. Somehow I don’t see that happening. The long-and-short of it is the first team have got to start clicking. We know they can play – they showed it to us time and time again last season. Do they think League One is below them now? Well, guys, I’ve got a shock for you. We know they can play, but can they achieve consistency? That is going to be the key to this campaign, and where we fell down last. If they can’t perform week in, week out at holes like Vale Park or Stockport then this is all for nothing. If the cold chill of the January air stops them playing then we’re screwed. They can’t even manage it in August and the relative warm. Milton Keynes Dons has become a very important game now. If we lose, the pressure on Kingy is going to mount. The last thing we need now is the upheaval of a managerial change. And to make it worse, I can’t go on Saturday. I’ll be away trying to tune in to the radio on scratchy medium wave … and if they do win, I’ll start on the ‘am I cursed’ rubbish. Either way, the socks won’t be far away.
| 
