New kids on the block

Hereford FC travel to Manchester on Saturday to lock horns with Curzon Ashton, as they attempt to start climbing away from relegation trouble.

There’s something deeply ironic about going to the wettest city in Britain in order to find a football pitch dry enough to play a game on. Given the water-based travails of HFC recently, that irony’s enhanced by the prospect of playing a club called Marine after this on Tuesday. That’s assuming the Edgar Street surface is up to it.

The forecast for Manchester is wet (of course it is), but the rain should be light, which should aid the crisp passing on the floor and overall total football that will be the hallmark of the Bulls’ dominance as they surge up the table and crash the play-offs over the course of the next few months.

The stop-start nature of the season so far, a season which has recently been a lot more stop than start, has been frustrating for supporters of course, but for the club’s staff it must be very difficult indeed, particularly in the era of unhelpful poisonous, anonymous and cowardly social media contributions; those staff members are trying to practically and constantly do things for the good of the club, and will make mistakes along the way, as we all do.

The multifarious reasons why this season hasn’t yet gone to plan are mirrored by the many opinions we all have on how the club is set up and whether it’s an accurate manifestation of the model we were presented with, almost as a non-negotiable, when HFC was marketed as the only available option to counter Tommy Agombar. We were sold it at a time when we needed a football club like a junkie needs a fix. We’re now a club possibly in flux and needing an investor if we want to progress, but where is that progression progressing to? Countless millions given away by someone for the right to play Tamworth in the division above? Countless more for the right to play Harrogate in the EFL? And let’s be clear it’s very much ‘given away’ not ‘invested’. It’s almost certainly football generally that’s wrong and bankrupt, in several senses of the word, rather than HFC and its prudent financial planning that is holding the club back.

It was encouraging to hear Paul Caddis trying to find positives from the situation during the week, so how’s this for a positive? If Hereford win their eight games in hand over seventh-placed Scarborough they’re just three points behind the Seadogs.

With new players coming in and the hope of drier weather signalling a start to the two-game-a-week programme the Bulls have ahead of them for the rest of the season, it feels very much like a mini-season is about to commence. It’s that which the manager will be looking to tackle on the front foot with a positive mindset, in the hope that it will go much better than the mini-season that never really got started from August until now, which is probably best to just forget all about.

The players coming in are younger than most of my trousers, so they should have plenty of enthusiasm, and they’ve also been described as skilful. Now, it might seem a bit odd finding fault with that, but with the Edgar Street pitch likely to remain heavy for some time, will it be a surface that skilful players will benefit from playing on? Hopefully there will be some grit to go with the skill.

Encouragingly, the Nash are better away than they are at home, as demonstrated by them racing to a 3-0 lead at Edgar Street earlier in the season before conceding three goals to the now-departed Omari Sterling-James. They’ve scored twice as many goals away as they have at home.

Further encouragement can be gained from the fact that they’ve lost five of their last six games. The standout result from that poor run was the 8-0 loss at home to in-form Telford. They also lost last time out 2-1 at bottom club Leamington, with the Brakes scoring the winner in the 94^th minute. All in all this looks like an excellent time to be playing them.

Veteran striker Jimmy Spencer knows the division inside out, but their goals this season have come from ex-Marine striker Bradley Holmes.

The Bulls’ relegation problems are now very real, such that even if they win their next two games they’re still likely to be in the bottom four. Multiple games in hand are useful, but a continuation of the form which has seen them win just one game in their last ten will fail to convert those games in hand into the points necessary to get out of trouble.

What of these new kids on the block brought in recently by Paul Caddis? 19-year-old Villa loanee Charley Pavey has done well a level lower with Bromsgrove, scoring freely with finishes described as ‘stunning’ and ‘confident’ in the local press. The pair of midfielders from Notts Forest, Cormac Daly and Cherif Yaya both look like they may be able to supply that grit along with some quality, with Yaya in particular described as ‘tenacious’. He’ll need to be in this division as a defensive midfielder.

It would of course be grossly unfair to expect three teenagers to between them turn the Bulls’ season around, but they’re intriguing new options for Caddis to deploy and should add some freshness to the dressing room if nothing else.

With the hosts’ confidence presumably at rock bottom, they could get very wobbly indeed if the Bulls can uncharacteristically score rather than concede an early goal. Can the recently-arrived new kids provide that goal and make a much-needed difference generally? We’ll soon find out.

COYW