Reaction to the defeat at Stockport County


By Nathan Jackson
November 5 2006

Lincoln City were top for all of 7 days but that ended with a defeat at Stockport County that could have been much worse. Nothing went our way as Stockport bossed the game and it definately wasn't the performance of a team that was supposed to be the best team in the division going into yesterday.

I would normally say that I’m worried that we’ve been second best in our last two games but the only thing I’m worried about was that yesterday, Stockport kept Forrester out of the game and we didn’t look like creating anything and it made us look like a 1 man team. It’s fair to say that Forrester has easily been our best player so far this season and it makes you wonder where we’d be if he hadn’t been in the squad. We have a very good team of players but much like in 2003/4, you take the main striker (Taylor-Fletcher at the time) out of the game and you struggle.

Now it’s been a while since I’ve had a proper rant but does anyone bother turning up for set piece training? I mean surely it can’t be that hard to get the ball over the first defender. Our corners were an absolute joke and I personally don’t bother getting excited anymore when we win them because we near enough always waste them. The main culprit of the “crap set piece” club is Hughes, the youngster otherwise played well yesterday but if he could get the ball over the first defender then we’d have scored at least one yesterday.

Ironically, it was a set piece that saw the Imps go behind and how many times over the years have we seen a free kick being whipped in and going straight into the net? We seriously need someone at the back post on these, or at least someone trying to get in the way of the ball before it gets close to the goal. I’m not even going to get started on what was wrong with the second goal because the goal speaks for itself really. Has anyone also notice that when Morgan returns from injury as a sub, we always concede within minutes of the substitution? Not a criticism, just an observation.

There were some good moments of the game though and when we did manage to get forward, we did look like possibly scoring a few times but Stockport’s defence were resolute and snuffed out any of our decent chances and credit must go to them because they deserved to win by an absolute mile. City couldn’t’ really have complained if it had been 4 or 5 because Stockport played really well and if it hadn’t been for several goal-line clearances then it would have been 4 or 5.

Thankfully we’ve got a 2 week break from the league now and next week is a good chance to test ourselves against a mid-table team from the division that we’ll hopefully be playing in next season. Let’s not be disillusioned though, we’ll have to play a lot better than this in our final 29 games if we want to achieve promotion.