A truly terrible night under the Huish Park lights for the Glovers. Gloverscast Ben was bemoaning his DAZN Season Ticket purchase throughout, here are his Five Conclusions.
That was abysmal. On Saturday, I said that the 1-0 defeat to Halifax, whilst obviously disappointing, was at least a significantly more spirited outing than the one we saw against Barnet. We looked to show intent, we had shots, crosses, we thought forward-thinking thoughts, for virtually the same team to go out 72 hours later and produce, a flat, disjointed, higgledy-piggledy, defeated, rudderless performance against relegation cannon fodder was nothing short of an abomination.
There were some little moments, mainly from Sonny Blu Lo Everton, who was the best of a chaotic bunch, but three terrible goals to concede rubbed salt into the wounds of a pretty terrible 10 days or so. I make it 340 minutes of football since Frank Nouble scored the second against Southend.
Speaking of Frank…
We need to talk about Frank. As it seems to do a lot these days, the rumour mill seemed to creek into gear on Tuesday morning with murmuring reaching Gloverscast HQ that Frank Nouble was off. Gateshead we were told, another club’s name came up also. To have it confirmed by Mark Cooper both before and after the game that this was true was an almighty slap in the face.
His run of three goals in three games seems like an age ago and with recent comments about ‘Men vs Boys’, ‘Lack of Leadership’, ‘Immature’ performances, to have not just an on-field leader, but an off-field one too having his head turned by another club is producing all kinds of alarm bells for me. There’s no doubt it’s obviously affected the side since Halifax, the performance was that of a group that didn’t have a leader in the changing room. The club captains this season were either in Oldham, somewhere near Gateshead, the gym doing weights or in the stands.
Mark Cooper says fans don’t care about transfers, sorry, but we do. We care about what’s leading our leaders to lead their families away from Huish Park.
We signed a player. Whilst the chat was about a player who was potentially on his way out, we shouldn’t overlook that we did sign a player. Jahmari Clarke, who we did see for about an hour last season if you recall – did that lovely thing against Torquay, and then disappeared. In a 45-minute cameo, he was called ‘lazy’ at least twice by the commentary team, got booked for just steamrolling through a player well after the ball had gone and blazed his only sniff of goal over the Thatchers Stand. If Jahmari Clarke on a non-contract deal is the answer, we’re asking the wrong questions.
