Inability to Score

[SlockyNCFC]

So, amongst everything else that is going wrong at Notts, we seem to have developed a major problem in scoring goals. Since beating Mansfield, aside from the Carlisle game (which now seems to have been a freak one-off) my brief check of our results indicates we've now scored 2 goals in 6 games. In the two games we scored, we conceded 4 goals in both, against Cheltenham and Newport.

I'm not sure what the reason is, whether it is tactics and Ardley's instructions, the players we're picking, or if the squad is just altogether hopeless. What I can see is that we take an age to set up attacks, and pretty much all of our play is in front of the other team. The end result is us losing the ball, or some kind of hopeful ball into the box that is hopelessly easy for League 2 defences to deal with.

Out of our attacking players, Enzio is not doing much for us, for whatever reason. Stead has looked out of sorts, Hemmings seems isolated far too often, CMS seems to spend more time defending while Gomis offers little beyond pace - which isn't helping us much when teams set up against us to defend, and hit us on the break. Doyle and O'Brien have toughened us up in the middle, but don't create much. Vaughan goes from playing well at Carlisle to being useless against Morecambe.

The lack of a target man in our squad is an obvious problem, but given this, our consistent inability to move the ball around fast enough to get behind or play through teams is killing us. The result is what we see: we can't score. What worries me most about this is that I can't really see much of a solution, beyond going for broke and sticking a defender (such as Brisley) up front as an emergency target man in a last ditch attempt to win headers.

[tactition]

Apologies ,I hadn't read your post when I started mine. But I agree re: Brisley upfront. I'm not saying it's going to work but it's certainly worth a try. We are definitely missing a target man.