Hereford FC and everyone with an
emotional stake in the club will be hoping that this Tuesday’s game against
Macclesfield FC goes considerably better than last Tuesday’s against Oxford,
and Saturday’s against Southport.
This one’s a battle between two phoenix
clubs who in recent years lost their surnames as a result of terminal financial
problems. United and Town are now both truncated ‘FCs’ as newly formed clubs.
Newly promoted Macclesfield emulated
Hereford in shooting up the lower leagues (after previous incarnation
Macclesfield Town went pop in 2020), and cantered into the National League
North in winning the Northern Premier last season, a good few weeks before the
end of the season.
Media darling Robbie Savage was at the
helm for that promotion, before leaving for Nailsworth’s Forest Green Rovers.
The loss of the distraction of his national profile may be no bad thing, but
the loss of Laurent Mendy, Tre Pemberton, and Neil Kengni, who went with him to
the Stroud Valleys, could have been felt more deeply. That hasn’t really been
the case though, as like Merthyr they’ve adapted quickly and well to the NLN,
and sit in eighth place.
On Saturday they drew 1-1 at home to
Telford, a result that ended a run of four straight wins that took the Silkmen
to the periphery of the play-offs.
Centre forward Danny Elliott has eight
goals in 14 games this season and will profit from any sleepiness or sloppiness
in the Hereford defence, or specifically from those dreaded ‘individual errors’
that have been questionably cited as being the sole cause of Hereford’s poor
start to the season. He scored 40 in 50 last season at a level lower, and got a
goal every other game for Boston at this level a few seasons ago.
Midfielders Justin Johnson and Isaac
Buckley-Ricketts are familiar players from their time with Chorley and Curzon
Ashton respectively, with Johnson being Chorley’s star man a
couple of seasons ago.
The league table now paints a stark
picture for Hereford. 11 points behind Kidderminster who sit in the final
play-off spot, just a point above the dreaded relegation dotted line, and three
points clear of bottom club Leamington.
Saturday’s Edgar Street crowd was
marginally up on recent weeks — astonishing loyalty from a fabulous fanbase.
Given the outcome of that game, the position in the table of the opposition and
the fact that they played over half the game with ten men, this could be the
first game in this difficult season where the fans vote with their feet and
stay away. Club captain Lewis Hudson’s plea on Saturday evening for everyone to
stick together was a typically dignified intervention, but it’s certainly more
obligation than enjoyment at the moment for many fans.
Paul Caddis and now Hudson have both
made it clear that the dressing room is far from ‘lost’, and that at least
offers some sort of base camp from which to attempt to launch a salvage mission
on the season.
Matt Preston will be serving his
one-match ban here for his sending off last week, with Kyle Howkins and Mike
Parker set to form the centre back partnership.
The young centre forward McFarlane from
Solihull has started relatively quietly but it can’t have been easy coming into
a dressing room low on morale. It would be timely if he could now, having had
two games to find his feet, start to show what he can do, with one of those
things hopefully being the scoring of bucketloads of goals.
Harley Hamilton didn’t take long to get
off the mark in opening his goal account for the club, and something that has
been lacking this season (OK one thing among quite a few) has been a player
with the ability to bundle ugly goals in. If he has that happy knack he’ll have
been a good capture from Alvechurch.
Perhaps he could start here and inject a
bit of enthusiasm into the side, given that he hopefully won’t yet have been
tainted by the demoralising effects of the difficult start to the season that
must be weighing heavily on some of the players who have endured Kings Lynn,
Chorley, Hemel Hempstead, Oxford and now Southport (incidentally a list of
places that never appear on perfume bottles or designer clothing labels in the
same way Paris, Milan and New York do).
Two scenarios:
1/ 1700 witness a blistering performance
that emerges from nowhere and delivers a 4-1 win, while 800 people
simultaneously mutter ‘Bloody typical’ as they choose, totally understandably,
to stay at home with their slippers on having had enough of the ‘entertainment’
they’ve been subjected to over the last few weeks. The irony being that 800 is
what constitutes an average attendance for the league leaders.
2/ 2500 turn up again because they don’t
want to miss witnessing the moment the corner is turned, everything suddenly
clicks, and this rotten run comes to an end. As it will.
Whatever happens, Paul Caddis is
presumably going to have to try something genuinely radically different, and I
don’t know what form that might take (possibly registering and playing himself
at right back?), but you wouldn’t want to miss it would you?
COYW
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