The Macc Lads

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