Munday, Tuesday, happy days?

So, phew, where to start? And what next? Mo Salah in on loan playing off George Munday?

Newly-led Hereford FC ‘host’ Darlington on Tuesday, and are very generously removing the delights of the A4103 leg of the Quakers’ long midweek journey down south. That last soul-destroyingly slow bit off the motorway that Graham Turner for years pretended didn’t exist has been taken out of the equation given the current state of the Edgar Street pitch, meaning that the visitors will experience multi-lane luxury all the way to Sixways, the venue for this game.

Darlington are generally seasonal slow starters, tending to move up the table in spring, like neighbours Spennymoor. However, this season Spennymoor are doing a very good impression of not being good enough to lurch into life at all (sounds familiar), whereas Darlo have been all over the top half of the table for some time.

The Quakers’ game on Saturday at home against Kiddy was postponed (we’re not alone!), so they’ll be fresh for this.

When these teams met in September Mike Parker and Sam Osborne were instrumental in rescuing a point for Hereford, both now long-gone of course. I suggested at the time, not hugely insightfully, that ‘a solution to that early leakiness does need to be found, pronto’. Now-departed Paul Caddis never did find such a solution, and sides are still not having to try too hard to score against Hereford. Can the new management team arrest that tendency?

Last season Darlington did the double over the Bulls, with Matty Cornish and Jack Maskell being notable thorns in the side of the Hereford defence. 21-year-old Maskell is scoring a goal every other game this season, but Cornish has been in and out. Alongside Maskell, ex-Gateshead player Tom Allan and ex-York centre forward Cedric Main, the latter with 11 league goals, comprise a potent attacking threat.

They lost influential midfielder Will Hatfield to injury for the rest of the season in October, after he’d scored three goals in eight appearances. At 34 his best years are behind him, but their squad is populated with such good players, players whose more southerly equivalents don’t seem to be coming to Hereford, for whatever reason, presumably money. Again, can the new management team do more over the coming weeks to attract those more southerly equivalents?

Darlo are currently a point shy of the play-off positions behind Macclesfield and Telford, two clubs a regenerated Hereford should next season aspire to be at least on a level with, along with Merthyr. That’s assuming they can stay up this season; that ‘assuming’ is doing increasingly heavy lifting in sentences as the weeks go by.

To attempt to start building a ‘potent attacking threat’ of their own halfway through the season, Hereford brought in 6’ 3” 19-year-old George Munday prior to the Southport game on loan from Cambridge. He’s already averaging a goal a game for his new club having scored a consolation penalty on Saturday, so perhaps he’s ‘the one’.

What he isn’t is the experienced and proven goal-getter fans were hoping for, but if it was easy to find one one of those it would have been done already. No manager has managed it in Hereford’s NLN years, which suggests that the playing budget no longer allows it, hasn’t for some time, and is increasingly uncompetitive even at NLN level, as mad egomaniacs in charge of non-league football clubs skew the market by putting players on £2k a week who would make Keith Hicks look like having feet as quick as Ronaldinho’s.

So, plastic pitch, very odd scenario generally, just a few days after getting a mauling from one of the division’s poorer teams, new management team in the dugout. This could be absolutely anything, but a 4-0 ‘home’ win might see supporters wanting to decamp to Worcester permanently. OK, maybe not.

Oh and I see Merthyr, a side I suggested in the Southport preview had gone wonky post-Ricardo Rees, wonkily only scored seven on Saturday. Clearly on the slide. Seven lucky goals. It can clearly be done even when you’re not obviously cut out geographically for the National League North, and don’t have ridiculously deep pockets.

Finally, with the news that Adam Rooney is still at the club and assuming no new signings are brought in by the new management team ahead of this -  maybe he should start here. I’d be tempted to have him in at centre back playing the same role Michael Gash did in his later years for Peterborough Sports, very successfully. There have been times over the last couple of seasons when his authoritative direction on the pitch has instantly given shape and structure and threat where it had been lacking without him. All of that was lacking for the final hour on Saturday.

Welcome Aaron, welcome back Harry, this feels potentially very good, and if the 'bounce' didn't come on Saturday it may well come here and then who knows, maybe even an extended 'honeymoon period' all the way to safety and renewed contracts for next season.

COYW