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17th sounds a bit worse than it actually is. The NLN league table is getting ever more nutty, with three points now separating 7th from 19th. With Tamworth going a bit wrong, that leaves Scunthorpe as the only side who are at all reliable (unless you include Gloucester and Bishops Stortford who are also reliable, but in a bad way). Admittedly Chester had put a run together before finding a way to lose at Josh Gowling’s hapless Darlington, and given that there are usually two or three consistent enough to be clear of the rest, Chester still do look like they may be one of those destined to keep Scunthorpe company, but could a full-strength Hereford join them…?
There’s
still plenty to prove on that front in terms of getting out of the division
upwards, but perhaps optimists like me are concentrating on the wrong end of
the table given the manager’s suggestion that “The remit at the football club
is to stay in the division because of the stuff that's gone on behind the
scenes." A gnomic utterance to be pounced on by conspiracy theorists and
paranoid maniacs, if ever there was one, and for ‘conspiracy theorists and
paranoid maniacs’ read ‘football fans’. For a club the size of Hereford to get
relegated from this division would take some doing, you’d assume, but perhaps
it was an honest appraisal of where expectations should sit. It wasn’t an
appraisal that was mentioned when season tickets were being touted by the club in the summer though.
New Banbury boss Mark Jones has done a good job of stabilising the ship following the departure of popular head coach Andy Whing, who was many Bulls fans’ idea of the ideal replacement for Josh Gowling last season. Whing announced in the summer that he was leaving the club having enjoyed a hugely successful spell with them, before resurfacing at Solihull.
Ex-Bull Simeon Maye joined the Puritans in the summer, as did Jack Davies, who had spent ten years at MK Dons, which is some achievement given that he’s only 20. Former Kings Lynn striker Ken Charles has five goals this season in a side that has only managed 13 goals between them, a degree of goal shyness only matched in the division by bottom club Gloucester.
The Puritans won at high-flying-but-now-stuttering Tamworth on Saturday courtesy of a very late goal from Maye, his first for the club. They’ve won their last three away, and the chances of winning four away on the bounce are slim to non-existent, so the laws of probability are well on the side of the hosts here.
Banbury were newly-promoted last season, and did the double over Hereford, comfortably winning at home before Whing thoroughly out-tacticked Josh Gowling in the second half at Edgar Street to steal the points.
Banbury are Alex Babos’s old club of course. He’ll presumably be looking forward to this one having returned from injury on Saturday, and hopefully that will be reflected in his performance. He scored five times in 86 games for the Puritans, and has four in 15 already for Hereford. Testament perhaps to both his own progress and the influence of Paul Caddis.
Paul Downing’s return to first team action sounds like it’s imminent, imminent enough to bring him into the reckoning as a starter here. It could be Downing’s return that gives the team the boost to go on an unbeaten run that would, given the inconsistency of everyone in the division except Scunthorpe, Gloucester and Bishops Stortford, be more than enough to shoot up the table.
The first-half performance on Saturday seemed to suggest the players were suffering from ‘bus legs’ a bit, coupled with the accumulated effort of the recent FA Cup games and a big shift against Brackley. The bus legs factor could work the other way in a couple of Tuesday evening games soon though. Given the nature of the geographical spread of part-time teams in the NLN, Tuesday night games can unsurprisingly and understandably bring flat performances out of the visitors. With Warrington and Scarborough making the trip to Hereford over the next few weeks, six bus-leg points are there for the taking.
Talking of which, a six-point return from Chorley, Brackley and Boston is far from disastrous, and if Jason Cowley had scored late in the game at Boston everything in the garden would have looked rosy (and, ridiculously, Hereford would have been 11th rather than 17th), but a loss always puts a big stick in the spokes of momentum, and a quick return to winning ways is needed here before the NLN has a rest over the weekend to make room for the FA Trophy.
2,000 turned up last Tuesday despite Newcastle and Man City being on the telly. Horsham v Barnsley on ITV4 is the competition this Tuesday, which hopefully won’t have quite the same potential to keep people away from the home of football.
An explosive start right from the ‘b’ of the bang, or rather the ‘w’ of the whistle, would be good to see. With these two clubs in the bottom four for goalscoring prowess, this has 4-3 to Hereford written through it like a stick of rock.
COYW