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When these clubs met at Edgar Street in January The Heed eased to a 2-0 win and looked very much like they’d be there or thereabouts in May, and lo and behold they are indeed there, and not just thereabouts.
Having said that, Hereford were at the time dipping. The golden month of November, when things were starting to look very promising, was by then a distant memory, and the potentially lucrative Christmas home games had been wiped out by Covid, costing the club tens of thousands of pounds.
Since then the club has been unable to put any sort of decent run of results together, not helped by losing players to rival clubs, and as a result the play-offs proved to be a step too far for a club still getting used to the rigours of National League North, and trying to stabilise after several acts of self-harm in terms of managerial sackings and appointments, prior to wisely giving Josh Gowling and Steve Burr a proper go at it over two years.
The Gowling-Burr partnership will know precisely what’s needed over the summer, but they’ll also know that signing a decent centre back, midfield general and centre forward won’t be easy when the budget is reportedly mid-table at best. However, getting those three right will have knock-on benefits included in the price. Having a striker who can play with his back to goal, and get into those six-yard box tap-in positions Jaanai Gordon has scored from for and against the Bulls this season would certainly be progress in its own right. The added value comes from giving the likes of Tom Owen Evans, Miles Storey and Ryan McLean someone to productively buzz around and feed off. That could add 10% to each of their performances, and when Storey has been tried this season playing off a striker (notably at Kettering before he pulled up injured) he’s looked potent. I’d like to see what he can do alongside Striker X, with TOE and McLean alongside, but financially that might be impossible.
I’d also like the striker to actually be called Striker X as it sounds very snazzy and like he might have superpowers. How much would Kidderminster have paid for Mark Druce if he’d been called Striker X and not Mark Druce? It would have been even more than the £10k they actually ludicrously did pay wouldn’t it (and that was when £10k would have got you a house in Bobblestock and a Fiesta XR2i to park outside it).
For Saturday’s hosts, Macauley Langstaff (which is nearly as good a name as Striker X) and Cedwyn Scott have scored 50 league goals between them this season, which is precisely the number Hereford have managed between them, and that’s, well, not too encouraging I suppose.
The Heed are full-timers, unbeaten in six and have only lost one of their last ten games. They’ve won 17 of their 20 home games to date, averaging three goals a game. Is it worth just changing the subject at this point and talking about knitting or something?
In contrast, Hereford have lost half of their away matches this season, and current form generally is pretty ramshackle.
Josh Gowling doesn’t have a great many options with which to conjure a/ a goal or two, and b/ a way to stop the Heed from maintaining that three-goal-a-game average at the other end, but certainly ‘b’ looks more likely than ‘a’, thanks in no small part to many people’s player of the season Ben Pollock, and the form of Brandon Hall. With the honourable exception of TOE, there aren’t equivalent reasons for optimism at the other end of the pitch. A Yan Klukowski hattrick here, for example, feels less likely to happen than the Blackfriars End winning an architecture award.
So it may be unlikely, but so was the comeback on Monday against Brackley. Here’s hoping for a win to round off the season for a squad of players who do seem like a genuinely nice bunch of lads who’ve given it a good go this season, often against squads of players who seem like genuinely horrible bunches of lads.
Right, I’m off to make a ‘Don’t go TOE!!!’ banner to drape across the wings of the Angel of the North, visible from the HFC private jet as it flies past en route to the International Stadium.
See you in August for the start of what is surely destined to be an exciting play-off season with more goals, greater consistency and a less defensive formation, and thanks for reading these columns over the course of this season - I very much appreciate it.
COYW