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The Bulls, or more specifically Ryan Lloyd, suddenly found a bit of form in front of goal on Saturday in drawing 2-2 with Brackley. A similar result here would edge the club ever closer to safety as the season splutters and gurgles to a halt.
Leamington’s loss on Easter Monday put them back on track in terms of losing every match they play, after enjoying a brief break from getting beaten when beating Hereford on Good Friday. It also helped greatly in making the Bulls now long-odds outsiders for the drop. Having said that, they could still very comfortably finish 19th if they can’t find a way to win at least one of their remaining three fixtures, and 19th would be something of a backward step. A big backward step. Actually current position 17th would hardly be a great leap forward either of course, and the new manager, to be unveiled imminently, will have a heck of a job hitting the ground running in August.
Sports were something of an unknown quantity at the start of the season. They’re a club that has flown up the pyramid with successive promotions since the 2015/16 season, and there were suspicions that big, bad National League North would find them out, as it has countless others (mentioning no names here), and that their meteoric rise would come to a standstill.
Well, they’ve proved the doubters wrong, and a point from a goalless draw at Banbury on Easter Monday made safety a mathematical certainty. In fact they’d have still been in with a sniff of play-off qualification if they hadn’t tailed off recently, with two losses and that draw in their last three games.
Bulls nemesis Michael Gash plays up front for Sports and co-manages them, but with just five goals in 35 games age is perhaps catching up with the 36-year-old, although he’ll probably find a way to score given that he usually does well against Hereford. Fellow striker Mark Jones averages not far off a goal every other game for the club over almost 250 appearances. That impressive strike rate can perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt as he’s been with the club as they’ve gone through the pub leagues, so there was presumably a bit of flat-track bullying going on there to rack up the goals. That theory looks reasonable as he’s scored just four this season.
More reliable have been Jordans Nicholson and Crawford. The former has come back from a nasty broken leg earlier in the season to score an impressive eight goals in 21 matches from midfield, continuing to show since leaving Edgar Street that he is actually the player he fleetingly threatened to be when with the Bulls. Crawford, on loan from Boston, also has eight goals.
Incidentally, I’m not really sure there’s any sort of leg break other than a nasty one, so I don’t suppose I had to describe it as such really. You don’t ever get a pleasant leg break do you, unless you’re dangerously masochistic.
Winger Dion Sembie-Ferris was the Turbines’ big danger man this season, but followed manager Jimmy Dean to Scunthorpe in February, and it looks like both will be returning to their old club as visitors next season.
Anyone who witnessed the reverse fixture between these teams at Edgar Street will still be penniless having had to empty the piggybank to pay for the amount of therapy needed to recover emotionally from the experience. It has been described (and not just by me) as one of the worst matches witnessed at Edgar Street in living memory. It embodied the soulless ‘don’t lose at any cost’ approach that strips the ‘beautiful’ from the beautiful game and leaves it unwatchably ugly. Of course, Hereford lost.
It would be impossible for this to be as bad, but insalubrious venues such as Sports’ Lincoln Road ground have hosted some of the Bulls’ least inspired performances this season, so a certain wariness ahead of the game is natural.
It would help perhaps to throw caution to the wind and play two up front again, an approach that coincided (surprise, surprise) with those goals going in on Monday. In the context of the ‘mustn’t lose’ tactical approach this season (and the last), it does seem ridiculously gung-ho, like when Ossie Ardilles used to play 4-2-4 at Tottenham (not conspicuously successfully). However, in the context of Hereford FC supposedly being in the entertainment business, there’s nothing outrageously risky about it at all and it’s more likely to entertain.
Finally, a word on Yan Klukowski. Results since he gamely took over have obviously not gone the way he’d have liked, but he has conducted himself with great professionalism throughout his caretaking tenure, and seems like an honourable and honest man. Those qualities are to be savoured in a sport that so often seems to have thrown its moral compass to the floor and stamped on it repeatedly. He deserves to oversee a win or two before the season’s out.
COYW