The 'pitch problems' derby

There have been three attempts to play Scarborough away this season, and all were postponed, which means that this will be the first time these sides have met, and the meeting will be taking place at the Valley Stadium, Redditch, on plastic, 50 miles from Edgar Street but handy for many of the Hereford players. All of the above would have sounded as nuts as Elon Musk before a ball was kicked in August, but 2025/26 has been a strange old season.

The Edgar Street pitch will be ready to accommodate football matches in March, so with a bit of luck this will be the penultimate ‘home’ match away from Edgar Street before a return to our proper home for the rest of the big fight against the drop.

This has been a challenging season too for the Seadogs following plastic pitch replacement issues at the Flamingo Land Stadium, which has left them playing home games twenty miles down the coast at Bridlington. Thankfully the local council has confirmed that those issues will be resolved in time for next season and a return home for the club.

This is therefore something of a pitch problems derby.

They didn’t have a game midweek when Hereford grabbed three much-needed points against Darlington, but last Saturday they beat Curzon Ashton 1-0 at home, or rather at Bridlington. They sit in sixth position in the table but their recent form has been patchy. 13 points from their last ten games is of course a better return than what Hereford have managed, but it won’t be enough to keep them in the play-off positions if they continue in the same vein until the end of the season.

They’re typically a good-to-watch passing team. Luca Colville, Alex Purver, Lewis Maloney and Harry Green have all shown themselves to be smart and creative midfielders against Hereford before. Dom Tear always weighs in with goals, but the big success story for them this season has been ex-Middlesbrough youngster Stephen Walker, who joined last February from Whitby. He has 12 league goals in 25 games. Another signing from Whitby, Kieran Weledji, scored the winner against Curzon on Saturday and has six goals this season from right back. He’s fond of a card too, which is something that Aaron Downes will have picked up on and will be keen to exploit, given that the defender will be tasked with containing Cormac Daly. An early yellow would leave that flank ripe for the creation of openings.

With regard to the ‘R’ word, there’s usually a side that suddenly goes very wrong and only manages to pick up a handful of points from their last ten matches. That side looks to be Bedford this time around. With Leamington gone and Alfreton looking very precarious, that could be three relegation slots already booked up. Hereford can avoid the fourth with an extended Downes-Pell honeymoon period.

The Bulls need to demonstrate here that they simply want to win a lot more than Scarborough do, and given where they are in the table, and hopefully a desire among the players to prove to the new manager that they’re worth persisting with, that should be a given.

Tuesday night’s late winner was perhaps scripted by fate, but that was becoming increasingly difficult to believe right up to 88 minutes into the match. A truly gutsy penalty from Aaron Skinner, given the circumstances. Most remarkable was that the side kept a clean sheet following the concession of eight goals in the last two games, and a defensive horror show of a season generally.

George Munday looks like a young loan striker who’s actually worth having. He’ll score more before the season’s out, and the two new young Cheltenham loanees could play a significant role too over the course of their month-long loans, as, perhaps, will Lawson Dath, who looks like he may be close to a return.

Could Harley Hamilton be moved deeper to play a Gavin Mahon or, more recently, Sammy Robinson role in being a technically gifted footballer but one able to break up play and then pass intelligently and accurately into attacking positions quickly? That ‘quickly’ has so often been missing from the Bulls this season, whilst also being the cause of so many goals conceded against teams who are coached to attack directly, but on the floor and not in a one-dimensional aerial bombardment way.

Robinson was able to tackle and then immediately launch White or Ceesay on either wing with a pass, not a hoof, into the corridor of uncertainty between the full back and the space into which the wingers were destined to meet the pass. The full back then maybe makes a mistake, which at this level is totally possible, or the wide player collects the ball in their stride, does some fancy trickery, and then as a result makes room for a shot or presents a chance for the striker(s). That sort of thing has been really, really missing this season, and is something defences at any level can’t stand. What defences at any level love is plodding lateral passes going nowhere but sideways in front of them.

It was impressive that the club on Tuesday still attracted a ‘home’ gate that bettered full-time high-flying Fylde’s average attendance, even when the Bulls were playing a home game in totally the wrong place, and this mad old season continues in its own unique way with Redditch here followed by Sixways again on Tuesday for the visit of Chester. I’m not sure what it says about me but every single time I see Sixways I read it as Saxtys.

COYW