On reflection ... and staying positive

[Timmy58]

What, Steve Davis as manager with Dario as his assistant. Now that would be interesting

[Oldstuff]

Surely even this season we have had a mixture of them? You could argue that certain younger players have been given opportunities to play in the 1st team when they wouldn't have made the bench at other clubs after disastrous performances in, for example, defence. And putting in a bunch of Crewe kids to see them just get hammered week after week will do nothing to help them in the long run. Loan players aren't that much of an issue. What the team lacks sometimes is attitude and strength of character.

[Crewe99]

To me, the main issue has always been that we are too lightweight. When you look at teams of our level in the league (Rochdale, Oldham, etc) they are more physical than us and bully us out of the game. We aren't good enough to out-football them so succumb to a battle we are never going to win.

The other point is one I made some time ago in that we no longer seem to look at players released by the big clubs in our area (Platt, Savage, etc) and give them a chance.

[thnhouse]

Thats a great point we've always had the issue of being lightweight but now we've stopped out footballing teams.

Does that mean we need to buy some big athletic players who can bully back or play to our strength of developing good technical footballers and build a formation around them.

Players like Turton, Jones, Cooper, Waters, Colclough, Davis and Atkinson are all good footballers who should form an adequate spine of a team able to play patient passing football ,most of them have been taught to do that since they were kids. It's poor tactics terrible recruitment of strikers and an awful pitch thats stopping them.

[Furberstreet]

Agree with Thnhouse. We need a tough spine through the team to cope with the "bullying" sides, but we can use our home grown players around them to out pass teams. We do need to score more goals as well as to stop conceding so many. Earlier on this year we were seeing some away games where we only managed one shot on target.

[PaulNevitt1981]

On reflection we need to start next season much better than this. We need to stop the school boy errors which lead to conceding more goals than necessary and thus having a very large deficit in goal difference. We need to get a squad of our own players and stop relying on the loan market all the time.

Most of all we'll need to play football using formations that will give us more possession and better chances of scoring goals. Pace if possible or more power all over the pitch.