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It’s another big game on Tuesday night for the Bulls as they finally return home, with big-money Fylde coming to visit. The Coasters are full-time, and virtually nailed on for one of the play-off positions at least. Nick Haughton remains at the club, having scored 26 goals last season, including a long-ranger at Edgar Street that caught Brandon Hall out. In case you’re losing track, Brandon was Hereford’s goalie about 20 goalies ago. Haughton has brought that form into this season, having scored ten in twelve league games so far, which is quite a lot, quite irritating, and a bit of a concern. It tells us everything we need to know about Fylde’s deep pockets that the lad’s still there rather than moving on up.
Encouragingly, Fylde lost away at Leamington on Saturday, a club who have recently been in woeful form. Given the fact that the Lancastrians are full-time and therefore didn’t have jobs to go to on Monday other than kicking a ball around, they may well have stayed down south and kicked a ball around somewhere between Leamington and Hereford to save all the hassle of making the journey twice. I don’t know, I haven’t checked.
OK, I’ve now checked (the lengths I go to eh?), and I still don’t know.
They’re certainly not infallible at the moment, having won just one of their last five league games, and with that one victory doing what everyone other than Hereford seems to find quite straightforward, beating Bradford Park Avenue. They also dumped Kidderminster out of the Cup in a replay to join Hereford in the first round proper. This recent inconsistency could be down to the upheaval caused by manager James Rowe being shown the door three weeks ago after being charged with sexual assault. Andy Taylor is now in temporary charge at Mill Farm.
Highly experienced midfielder Curtis Weston was signed in the summer, but was dropped on Saturday. Fylde supporters believe that was a big mistake, so perhaps he’ll regain his place for this one.
Fylde’s record goalscorer Danny Rowe is currently back at the club on loan from Chesterfield, and ex-Bull Keenen Patten is also in the squad, although he always seemed a bit of a passenger to me in his time at Edgar Street.
Despite that recent ropey run, they still sit in sixth place, whereas Hereford now only have Boston and a bunch of the usual relegation candidates below them.
The Bulls’ defeat on Saturday suggests that the corner from Skid Row into Play-off Avenue still hasn’t been turned. The squad still looks short of being capable of putting together a long unbeaten run, and the Cup run masks the fact that only eight points have been won from the last eight league games. That’s treading water at best really.
Suffice to say another performance like that will result in defeat here, and a fear that once the Cup run is over the season will just bumble along uneventfully, rather than sparking into life. A glass-half-full take on it would, I suppose, be that Hereford usually lose to Bradford, it wasn’t played on grass, and the players struggled to get up for a game in the relatively modest environs of the Horsfall Stadium, following stellar performances at Boston and Bromley. I’d suggest that to be not so much glass-half-full as overly defeatist. Thankfully Josh Gowling’s honest assessment was that it was ‘awful’.
Jack Holmes offered some signs of creativity when coming on as a substitute at Bradford, perhaps doing enough to regain a starting place here if others are feeling as jaded as they looked in that game. Apart from that, it may be a case of the majority of Saturday’s starting XI being given the chance to redeem themselves, given the lack of viable options off the bench. However, we could potentially only see club captain Jared Hodgkiss in alternate games over the next few weeks during what is a fairly hectic fixture pile-up, given suggestions earlier in the season that he may only be up to one game a week.
The club is cleverly running a half-term promotion for this match allowing a parent and child in for £5. For many of those children, it’ll be their first experience of Edgar Street, and some will be so intoxicated by the under-the-lights atmosphere that they’ll be hooked for life. That’s more-or-less as bad for your long-term health as heroin, so well done the club for making something that’s prematurely aged many of us look like a generous offer to hard-up families.
How exciting to have a home game again. With the hosts due a reaction to that flat performance at Bradford, the visitors guaranteed to bring some genuine quality, and a bumper gate expected, bolstered by that £5 offer and fairweathers keen to jump the queue for Pompey tickets, this promises to be a stone-cold cracker with a buzzing atmosphere, and one to ensure that the first-match youngsters return for more. Of course, it could be absolute drivel like last weekend, but what have we got as Bulls lifers other than that eternal sense of hope over expectation?
COYW