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In a spiteful act of geographical sadism, on Saturday the fixture computer sends Hereford FC more or less back to where they came from on Tuesday night, as they travel to Kings Lynn Town looking for a second win in a few days in East Anglia, and a highly unusual win at The Walks specifically.
The Linnets were one of only a few NLN clubs who didn’t have a game on Tuesday, and they don’t have proper jobs on top of kicking a ball about as they’re full time, so they should be well rested for this. Last Saturday they edged past Curzon Ashton 1-0 away. That moved them back up to fourth in the table after a wobbly few weeks.
Their home record isn’t dissimilar to Hereford’s, so there’s no reason why the Bulls can’t go across there and ‘do a Spennymoor’, and Hereford certainly should have won the game at Edgar Street between these two in September.
Kings Lynn are something of a bogey team, and United/FC haven’t beaten them since before I was born, and that feels like a long time, especially when I try to get out of bed each morning. However that’s a bit like saying United/FC haven’t beaten Liverpool much, given that for a big chunk of that time Hereford United were glamorously playing Rochdale, Crewe and Wigan each week in nail-biting Football League re-election derbies (look it up kids) in front of stellar 1700 crowds, 700 of whom wanted desperately to fight each other to ambulance-inducing levels, when Kings Lynn were generally around and about where they are now, albeit with their own bankruptcy issues along the way.
However, with Brackley beaten twice already this season and four points taken from Peterborough Sports, bogeys under Paul Caddis are becoming history. They are though a team who would have started the season with top three aspirations, and aren’t far off fulfilling those aspirations, so this won’t be easy.
They looked at one point last season, along with Darlington, like hugely unlikely relegation certainties before belatedly getting their act together. It was a marked deterioration given that the season before they were one of only three clubs that demonstrated any sort of quality or consistency. A policy of remaining full-time but seemingly using young full-timers to keep costs down wasn’t conspicuously successful.
To counter that, their marquee signing over the summer was Gold Amatayo, who returned to the club from Kidderminster. It didn’t quite work out for him at the level above for either Harriers or Fylde, but the Swiss martial arts exponent scored 31 in 79 appearances in his last spell with Kings Lynn. He’s got five in 23 appearances so far this season and hasn’t been playing recently, so it’s not quite going as planned.
Jonathan Margetts has been doing the damage for them instead, with nine goals to his name. In a world in which everyone is seemingly going to Matlock, the striker went the other way, moving from Derbyshire to Norfolk a year ago.
Attacking midfielder Josh Hmami was brought in from Southport over the summer, and has ‘looked a player’ at times when visiting Edgar Street previously. A lot of their goals come from his creativity. Fellow midfielder and new arrival Josh McCammon was one of Peterborough Sports’ better players last season. Another midfielder and local lad, Fin Barnes, knows the division well after spells with Scarborough and Darlington. He was yet another new signing in the summer, and the new-look midfield looks like a strong one, capable of both providing the ammo and offering a goal threat in its own right.
At the back, ever-present Greg Taylor is on a season-long loan from Woking and looks to be a solid presence but no spring chicken, and even less of a spring chicken is goalkeeper Paul Jones, who has been at Kings Lynn for several seasons now, and has the likes of Sheffield Wednesday, Norwich and Pompey on his CV.
Generally, they tend to go shopping for players at a level above, whereas Paul Caddis is often hoping that players brought in from the level below will step up. With that in mind, to be just a few points short of them in the table is arguably over-achieving, even if it feels a bit underwhelming to be overachieving when you’re beneath Kings Lynn.
Tuesday’s win leaves Hereford just a point outside the play-offs, and they’ll go above the hosts here if they win. Remarkably, a win could also put the Bulls above Kidderminster, and if someone had suggested to me at 3pm on Boxing Day after that total mauling that in a few short weeks that could happen I would have considered them barmy. What a funny division this is.
Yusifu Ceesay and Kyle Howkins were absent on Tuesday, and given that they’ve arguably been the club’s players of the season so far it was really impressive that the squad found a way to scrap to a win against Needham on a quagmire pitch without them. They’ll hopefully be back here, although Caddis wasn’t able to confirm that post-match on Tuesday.
Levi Andoh and Matt Preston had good games against Needham, and the Dutchman looks like he’ll make a significant contribution for the remainder of the season.
New striker Remaye Campbell will be at Hereford for the rest of the season, and he'll hopefully add the sort of physical presence up front (and potentially at the other end defending corners) that the club currently doesn’t have. He was as prolific for Ilkeston as Montel Gibson, and coincidentally signed for Matlock at the same time as Gibson earlier this season. An intriguing and promising signing in a way that fella on loan from Tamworth earlier in the season whose name escapes me wasn’t.
323 fans made the trip for this one last season, although it was the opening game of the season. Even a couple of hundred this time could make a difference as the 12th man, as Hereford look to banish the bogeyman with a win at Lynn.
COYW