Yeovil Town’s unbeaten run in National League South came to an end in spectacular style with a 4-1 defeat at a Welling United side who still sit third from bottom of the table on Saturday.
The result means we have not won in our last three matches in all competitions, but, courtesy of other results in the division, that we are also still eight points clear at the top.
Once his fingers had thawed out after a chilly afternoon in South London, Dave gave us his thoughts about what he made of it all…..
We played their game, not ours: First things first, Welling absolutely deserved their three points. They took their chances better than us, they defended better than us and they wanted it more than us.
But, after Jordan Young missed an opportunity to put us 2-0 up after 20 minutes, we stopped playing our game and started playing Welling’s. Once they got their equaliser, they set out to pull our defence all over the place with pace and tenacity which we simply never matched.
It was a midfield crying out for Charlie Cooper: The chasm between our defence and midfield was a playground for Welling and neither Matt Worthington nor Sonny Blu Lo-Everton ever got to grips with it.
It was crying out for someone who could get the ball, do something simple with it and drive us forward and that player was Charlie Cooper.
He’s not every fan’s cup of tea, I get it, but when he came on for Worthington for the final 15 minutes, we looked much improved.
Picture courtesy of Iain Morland.
Our attack looked as much of a worry as our defence: Against Chippenham four days earlier, we could at least point to plenty of attacking play and a good performance from the opposition keeper, but I don’t recall Reice Charles-Cook in the Welling goal to have a huge amount to do.
Frank Nouble looked out of sorts, Sonny Cox struggled to get much of a foothold on the game and when Rhys Murphy came off the bench he looked typically lively, but missed a chance you’d have put your house on him to score.
In fact, the only major save I remember Charles-Cook having was from Alex Fisher, who put himself about well when he came on. It was good to see him back after such a long time and hopefully he can push those ahead of him in the pecking order to spark them back in to action.
No-one else wants to punish us: The positive was that, for all the chuckling there will be for our misfortune among other National League South sides, no team managed to take advantage of it.
Third-placed Hampton & Richmond, who are in the most in-form side in the division, were the only one of the top seven to win yesterday and both second-placed Aveley and Bath City in fourth fluffed their lines by dropping two points each on the road.
It will probably stick in the craw of our seagull bothering ‘friends’ in W*ymouth that they did us a favour with a late equaliser against Aveley.
There’s something special about this squad: These players have shown us time and again that there’s something special about them and that has not changed in three matches.
Yesterday at Welling was a bad (very bad) day at the office, but there’s characters and quality in this squad which we have not seen much of in the past decade. That did not change at Torquay (in the Trophy), last Tuesday night at Chippenham or this weekend.
Alex Fisher spoke post-match about there being some “home truths” in the Yeovil dressing room and this is when the experienced heads need to lift the troops.
Wrexham in the FA Cup (don’t look at their result from the weekend, by the way) is a ‘free hit’ which no-one outside of South Somerset expects us to do anything with and then we have two more away dates – at Bath City and Dartford – before we can taste the comforts of home again.
All games were away, now we have three more! We have been great at HP, but I hope this is not an omen of future results on the road.
Guess will lose at WREXHAM and then two tough away including Bath.
Let’s see how good we are after that lot