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Hereford FC look to put Tuesday night’s bitterly disappointing defeat behind them on Saturday as they hit the road and ‘go again’, if you can forgive me for using this decade’s most overused sporting cliché.
They ‘go again’ all the way up to Durham, and the Brewery Field, Spennymoor. That could be a good thing, given that the further away from Edgar Street they are the better the result seems to be.
Construction work on Fortress Edgar Street seems to have ground to a halt since the rock-solid foundations were laid on the first day of the season with that 3-0 win over South Shields. It does seem increasingly that the squad’s talents lie in fluently and incisively counterattacking and picking teams off on the break, which of course is more likely to be the case away from home. Breaking through two banks of four at home seems to be more of a challenge, but that’s to take nothing away from how good Needham Market were across the park on Tuesday.
It could be that the three centre backs policy is contributing to the apparent defensive frailty that is causing Hereford to concede the sort of facile goals that the opposition aren’t conceding against the Bulls. A back four of Skinner, Robinson, Preston and Hudson could be considered here perhaps, and I can’t imagine too many other clubs at this level would have as good a footballer as Sammy Robinson playing at centre back for them. His MoM award on Tuesday was thoroughly merited.
Maybe a drawbridge, moat and turrets can be added to the Edgar Street footprint at the same time that the new floodlights are put in to psychologically instil the fortress mentality in the players. It would also then be possible to charge Americans to come and have a look in the summer and generate a bit of May-August income.
For the hosts, striker Glen Taylor yet again finished as one of the top scorers in the NLN last season, but it’s midfielder Isaac Fletcher doing the damage for them this season, with his six goals to date making him joint top scorer in the division.
Graeme Lee took over as manager in January, and oversaw a very strong Moors finish to the season, ultimately resulting in them missing out on a play-off place by one point. Given that he’s now had a few months in the job, a pre-season with the players, and the chance to bring his own new recruits in, he’ll be looking to build on that this season.
Their start has been patchy though, with losses away against Rushall and Leamington looking like wonderfully rubbish results in terms of their beatability on Saturday.
However, Moors, unlike the Bulls, are staggeringly good at home. They’ve won 11 of their last 12 games at The Brewery Field stretching back to January. They also boast a very strong record in this fixture going back to 2018. In that time, they’ve won four of the five games between the clubs, but with last Saturday’s Brackley result still fresh in Bulls’ fans minds, or at least those fans who haven’t self-lobotomised in a bid to wipe out all memories of Tuesday, it’s clear that history counts for nothing.
Olly Dyson will be hoovering up in midfield for them having signed on loan from York, and he scored on Tuesday as they eased past Radcliffe 4-2 away. Will Harris replaced injured Glen Taylor in that game, which on face value is good news in that Taylor will presumably be missing for this one (not such good news for him of course), but unfortunately Harris was reportedly ‘a handful’ when he came on, and it has to be said that ‘a handful’ could be more than enough to cause the Bulls rearguard problems on current form. The former Gateshead man scored 16 for Moors last season, so is certainly no mug as Taylor’s understudy.
Having to compete with South Shields financially seems to be beyond them, which could prove troublesome in terms of being competitive at the top of the table this season, and is interesting given that Moors haven’t been short of a few bob themselves historically, but that home form does give them such a strong platform on which to build a play-off challenge.
Plenty of changes were made to the starting XI on Tuesday by Paul Caddis, and there will presumably be tweaks again here, with Ahkeem Rose possibly getting 90 minutes, and Andy Williams and Montel Gibson divvying 90 minutes up between them in some form. Preston Bitemo continues to look like he’s imminently going to do something astonishingly good, be it a mazy run past loads of players to create a tap-in for someone, or a volleyed goal from 30 yards. Tate Campbell will presumably have more space here to burst from one box to the other, and it’s easy to see from Tuesday’s first half how Chay Tilt could play a key role in some of that fluent and incisive counterattacking mentioned earlier.
As topsy-turvy as results have been so far, fifth in the table and top scorers is still some start. Let them be wary of that rather than us being wary of their home record.
Both of these clubs have been scoring freely so far this season, so it could be yet another nailbiting rollercoaster.
0-0 then.
COYW