By Nathan Jackson
January 13 2007

It was a day where City were certainly not at the races but will consider themselves not to be given a stonewall penalty. At 1-0 up, Langmead decided to play basketball in the area but the referee didn't blow and that turned out to a turning point as City continued their poor start to the year.

City never seemed to get going today, and every time that we had a good chance to get forward just seemed to end with a slack bit of passing. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what happened today, at times it was like watching the Lincoln of the previous 4 seasons as the defence were just hoofing it upfield for Jamie Forrester to attempt to win a header.

 

I don’t mean this offensively to Forrester, but how many headers do you see Forrester win when he’s against a 6ft plus defender? Forrester could jump all day but he’s not tall enough to beat defenders who are 3/4/5 inches taller than him to headers. I’m not blaming this on Forrester at all, it’s not his fault that he suddenly has to chase lost causes that the defence are providing as they hoof it up the other end of the pitch.

 

What happened to the beautiful flowing football we were seeing earlier in the season? We were sweeping sides aside with our football earlier in the season, then all of sudden we’re slowing turning back into Keith Alexander tactics, and that has cost us as we now have pressure on us to gets results as the group have slowly started to catch up, and now were in serious danger of having to put up with the annual trip to the playoffs again, and I don’t know about you but I don’t want those again.

 

This is the first game in a while where we honestly deserved nothing. Although Shrewsbury were nothing special, they controlled most of the game, and had they managed to get more shots on target, you’d have fancied them to score more than the one they did get. As for City, we barely created anything all day, and it was no coincidence that our best move of the match ended in a goal.

 

Set pieces, do they actually practice them in training because they are quite literally awful. How many corners do we see where there’s no-one at the back post, yet that’s exactly where it’s played and it goes out for a throw on the other side. Our set pieces can be put into one of a few categories.

 

1)      Hit the first defender

2)      Go straight to the unchallenged goalkeeper

3)      Go right over the other side and out for a goal-kick or throw in

4)      A shot that goes well over the target.

 

If we have serious ambitions of avoiding the playoffs again, we’ll have to sort this out because with the amount of set-pieces we do get, we’d score at least 1 or 2 a game if we made the most of them. I never get excited when we have a corner or free kick close to the box anymore because it’s obvious what’s going to happen.

 

There were one or two plus points though. As I mentioned, the goal was a great move, and we’d have scored a few more if we’d produced that more often throughout the game. The moment at times was also fairly good, and to be fair we were denied a blatent penalty, so maybe if that had gone in, maybe we’d have won, but I guess we’ll never know.

 

Four years ago this weekend, we drew 1-1 at home with Shrewsbury at home after a midfielder put us in the lead, and we all know what happened after that. Alternatively, this weekend last season signalled the start of our season, could this weekend this season signal the end of this one? I hope not.