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With last week’s official start to the season going a bit wonky, Saturday gives Hereford FC an opportunity to get things started properly in front of a home crowd eager to see the new-look squad get three points on the board. Paul Caddis astutely got the one loss of the season out of the way nice and early, and can now concentrate on winning the next 45. This will end 2-1 or 3-1 to the hosts, and if it doesn’t I’ll frankly be amazed.
Very unusually for this division results tended to go the way you’d have expected them to last weekend, which means that Hereford’s promotion rivals already have a three-point start on them, and the Bulls must start their promotion push on Saturday afternoon from second-bottom in the nascent table.
Full-timers Kings Lynn are the visitors to Edgar Street, and actually the result of the Linnets’ game last weekend was arguably the only minor surprise, in that they were held to a 1-1 draw at home by newly-promoted Telford.
They’ve undergone big changes off the pitch over the summer. Former owner Stephen Cleeve has left after nine years, with Turn Sports Investments (handily located in Singapore) taking over and appointing ex-Gloucester boss James Rowe as head coach. He replaces the capable Adam Lakeland, who reportedly left in the aftermath of the budget being hacked to bits.
Rowe’s suggestion that he wants to recruit more ‘local talent’ is perhaps a bit of a tell that budgets are now a lot tighter than they used to be at the club. Having said that, Ajax and Feyenoord are fairly local to Kings Lynn so he may have meant he’d be raiding them for players.
As a result of a tightening of the purse strings, they’ve lost good players such as Josh Hmami and Fin Barnes, and brought in replacements who, on paper at least, certainly don’t make them look stronger. Three exceptions to that rule though are Michael Clunan, returning to the club from Scunthorpe, Jack Lambert from Chester, and Michael Gyasi from Peterborough Sports.
Gold Omotayo is still at the club, but his salad days as an NLN top striker are possibly behind him, at least on recent evidence (I’ll probably regret saying that).
Lynn had the majority of possession last Saturday against Telford, or rather enjoyed ‘total dominance’ if you believe local sources, but the suggestion seems to be that if you can stop Michael Gyasi you can stop Kings Lynn. Paul Caddis will no doubt have earmarked one of his charges to ruin Gyasi’s afternoon in whatever way it takes.
Incidentally 1300 turned up for Lynn’s opening game of the season, a figure that apparently sustains full-time football, although even that modest level of interest dwarfed fellow full-timers’ Buxton’s crowd of 957, which they described as ‘bumper’, and I don’t think they were being sarcastic. Baffling use of English there, and maths that really doesn’t add up, but they presumably both know what they’re doing and have a ‘route to sustainability’ figured out whilst apparently being hell-bent on actually and actively pursuing a ‘route to bankruptcy’.
The Linnets’ visit last season saw the Bulls unlucky not to take the points with a good goal chalked off and the visitors playing for a point they ultimately burgled in a 0-0 draw on a waterlogged pitch.
There’ll be no such issues with surface heaviness this time, and a good forecast and some shiny new players to take a look at will hopefully attract a ‘bumper’ crowd somewhere north of 957. In the context of Buxton’s crowd it feels somewhat luxurious that 957 people leave the Meadow End for ‘refreshments’ after about half an hour.
Early-season injury problems for Caddis mean that Matt Preston, Lawson Dath and Chris Wreh will almost certainly be missing here, and Kai Williams is a doubt. They’re four players who would have been strong starting XI contenders last week at Spennymoor and here, so that’s quite a collective miss at the very start of the season.
With Sam Osborne undoubtedly being ‘one to watch’ this season, what I’d like to watch him do on Saturday is play close enough to Remaye Campbell to profit from the latter’s knock-downs from long balls. When Alex Babos did something similar last season the side looked much more threatening, but he was often too deep, leaving RemCam isolated, thus allowing defenders to mop up comfortably after he’d busted a gut to make something of hopeful punts forward. The fact that he often did this with his shirt being pulled off him is to his credit. It was the same when Ty Barnett used to chase his own knock-downs because there was no-one else in a forward position to do so.
Eno Nto looked at Spennymoor like he’s going to be a handful this season and will hopefully be one of those wingers who comes alive in front of a crowd. Thinking ahead to winter away games, hopefully he’s also one of those wingers who comes alive in front of almost no-one too.
The forecast is for hot weather, so this game could be divided into quarters, which I always find irritating. I suppose it’s not quite as irritating as a rapidly warming planet signalling the imminent demise of the human race, but putting that minor detail to one side it gets right on my nerves.
OK it didn’t go to plan last weekend, but the Bulls can open their account here in front of an expectant crowd, and in doing so go further towards banishing the Kings-Lynn-as-bogey-team idea.
COYW