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A resurgent Hereford FC travel to the Silverlands Stadium in Buxton on Saturday looking to repeat the excellent performance and result against Curzon Ashton last weekend. Fortunately they’ll be playing homeless Farsley there though rather than Buxton, which should make this a far easier assignment.
To channel Oscar Wilde, to err once is human but to err twice is careless. In terms of racking up relatively easy points against the teams everyone else has beaten, the Bulls erred at Rushall. They won’t err at Farsley. You’d expect nothing else from Paul Caddis than to say that the hosts are scrapping for their lives and it’ll be a really hard game etc, but the club is, sadly, utterly shredded, and if this isn’t won, and won comfortably, it would be a huge shock. The club are indeed fighting, but not for their place in the National League North. That’s gone. It’s a fight for the survival of the club, and that fight is irrelevant to the outcome of this match.
Also, with goal difference quite possibly playing a key role at the end of the regular season in determining who secures the lower play-off spots, the Bulls not only need to make sure they win but also that when they go in front they press and press for more goals. This is the final opportunity to rack up goals before some actually proper tough games to round off the season.
Caddis has rightly stressed the importance of finding some consistency in a division where the c-word is virtually an alien concept, because a few wins on the bounce can completely transform your league position. Well, this is as good a chance as the club could wish for to record back-to-back wins and continue to ease their way out of the recent trough they’d sunk into. A win could propel the Bulls to the top of the play-off scramblers mini-grouping, namely Chorley, Kings Lynn, Curzon Ashton, Buxton and now Spennymoor, with the four clubs above that grouping now self-selected as play-off certainties and league title contenders.
Kings Lynn and Curzon both have a game against Farsley before the end of the season, and will be looking to bank both points and goals in those games.
All of this predatory racking-up-points-and-goals language doesn’t detract from the sympathy one feels for Farsley. It’s been an utterly horrible season for the Yorkshire side, with no pitch to play on at the Citadel pending a switch at some point to plastic. All of their games, even their ‘home’ ones, have therefore been away, and their current ‘home’ is 70 miles from their actual home.
Ex-manager, and ex-team mate of Paul Caddis, Clayton Donaldson left in November to join his old club York as ‘head of development’. Good players like Ben Atkinson and Tom Allen have gone too as costs are cut to the bone, and what’s left is essentially a game against youngsters. The average age of the squad is 19. They’ve scored three goals in their last ten matches, none of which have been won, and they lost 4-0 at Spennymoor last Saturday. They’re in a mess.
It was a really smart performance from the Bulls last Saturday in largely outplaying Curzon Ashton to the extent that the latter’s excellent away record never looked like being improved. However, that’s now the benchmark for the rest of the season in supporters’ eyes (and hopefully dressing room eyes). This side can be very good, and needs to be for the rest of the season. If last Saturday can be matched for the remaining six games, play-off qualification is a formality, but where was that quality over the preceding four games?
Kyle Howkins’ return made a big difference and his partnership with Matt Preston should oversee a clean sheet here. Tate Campbell, Lawson D’Ath and Alex Babos took control of the midfield last weekend after half an hour and didn’t relinquish it until Babos was substituted, which did then seem to give the visitors a way back. It’s great to see the Hereford playmaker playing such an influential role again, and getting closer to Remaye Campbell so that the striker’s panic-inducing presence among opposition defences has someone to pick up the pieces and do something dangerous with. Babos could captain the side here if new loanee Kieran Coates starts at right back and Aaron Skinner moves across to the left, with Lewis Hudson on the bench.
Those three midfielders should surely start again, which may mean a place on the bench again for Yusifu Ceesay (for whom Ramadan is now coming to an end) and Dylan Mitchell. Hopefully Omari Sterling-James can build on a promising debut against a defence that will comfortably concede 100 goals this season.
It would also be nice to have a referee who doesn’t seem to intensely dislike Remaye Campbell. The lack of any decisions going the way of the Hereford striker last week was quite astonishing, when his shirt was more or less up over his shoulders on several occasions and he was in a judo lock. Well done Remaye for not losing your rag when you almost lost your shirt.
There can’t be any Rushallesque slip-ups here, and there won’t be. A repeat of that classy performance last Saturday will be more than enough, and then a two-game winning streak can be taken into the last five games, all of which will be a good deal more competitive than this one has any right to be. And a two-game winning streak counts as consistency in this diabolical division.
According to the gaffer, a club with Football League history in its DNA, and average crowds that are twice those of many clubs in the division above, is over-achieving in being sixth in the National League North. I don’t know if that’s a managing expectations thing, or whether a club run in a financially prudent way can only get this far in the English football pyramid on decent crowds these days because everything else is skewed by benefactors. It would be good to know what’s behind that sense of over-achievement before season tickets go on sale for 2025/26.
COYW