Growing a pair at the UniBol. Man(up)sfield at home. Tuesday 3rd Nov 7pm.

[nicholaldo]

Well, that was shit! Not the complete humiliation they deserved thanks to Crawford and Sarcevic in the end.

And, I have to say, their keeper, who's so slow to react to Sarcevic's appalling first touch that I thought we'd swapped him for ours.

[BWFC_Insane]

Post match Evatt said Delaney, Santos and Sarce are carrying the rest who aren’t pulling their weight...got to agree but is it wise to say so in public?

Sarcevic basically saying without saying it directly that some players aren’t pulling their weight...

Sounds a very unhappy camp.

[nicholaldo]

That entire goal tbf. Imagine if we'd conceded that

Still time for me.. Pulling players out of a hat and no lwb and no keeper is murdering us. Always a chance that you pull two duds in one position. As long as we're not looking down by Jan he gets another couple of months, and about this time next year if we're safe.

That's pretty much where I'm currently at. I'm not massivey hopeful as things stand, and I don't think he's as talented as he thinks he is, but there are some good things to cling onto. He's identified the problems our specialist left wing-backs were causing us and replaced them with someone more trustworthy (and who has infuriatingly now picked up an injury), he changed Santos' fortunes around by playing him in the middle of the back three, he's beginning to get something out of Sarcevic and in between the calamities, we've recently had some decent spells of football. Comley, identified by most on here as not contributing enough, now no longer starts, and I imagine there are a few more he wants replacing.

We can't continue like this for very much longer, and we have no choice but to get rid of him if our league place is seriously under threat, but if the players we have out injured become available soon, we could be in a position to name quite a strong starting eleven in the coming weeks. Let's see where we are then.

[nicholaldo]

Post match Evatt said Delaney, Santos and Sarce are carrying the rest who aren’t pulling their weight...got to agree but is it wise to say so in public?

Sarcevic basically saying without saying it directly that some players aren’t pulling their weight...

Sounds a very unhappy camp.

It certainly does, doesn't it?

It's one thing to be so bluntly honest, but he might end up doing himself out of a job by being so. He has to get results good enough to see him through to January in order to properly do something about it. If too many of them stop playing for him, he'll struggle to.

[DJBlu]

He can go for me,

He's making the game difficult. They're trying to impose his system and when it doesn't work they don't know what to do. No plan B. Where've I heard that before?

These players are making simple things look difficult. They aren't making opportunities as he wants them to have the ball and move it. Thing is, they're doing this once in every 10 attacks. The other 9 are ending up with teams on the high press getting the ball when we ultimately lose possession.

Kioso was on the right all game and was ineffective. Why not give the old wing a swap? The left side was wide open and Gordon was shite on it all night, where's Hickman? Why not throw him on the right and Kioso on the left.

It's so obvious he has no game-changing tactics. It's shit or bust.

Tom White staying on is also a glaring example.

So pissed off with this club. It's like they just want to find more ways to make us suffer. Top to bottom again it looks hopeless.

That's a big change! What happened to the 5-0 win and us all getting to feck?!

We can all still get to feck.

Thankfully I had a 3 hour journey after that shit show.

Blood is still boiling. Well, I should say tepid.

I still think Crawford should be dropped and used as an impact sub.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Confidence is precarious but it’s also peculiar. What happened at Barrow that they came from 2-0 and 3-1 down? What happened that they suddenly found a goal against Mansfield? That’s two injury-time equalisers and, last Tuesday, what turned out to be a hard-fought win. In some teams this would be held up as champion stuff. But we know better. Individually, some of them slump, some hide. I do think that every fan worries more about his or her team but just before half seven tonight you could tangibly sense the confidence transfer from us to them. Yet who was more pissed off at the end?

Clearly the squad is unbalanced in terms of suitability. I have to wonder how much Evatt regrets not getting a more experienced LWB. Calum McFadzean is still unemployed last time I looked but we suddenly went for Mascoll, who appears to have annoyed Evatt in private as much as he annoyed some of the players in public last week, when we were all applauding the team spirit which is now deemed absent.

Maybe we pulled out of McFadzean (if we were ever interested) because we thought we’d get another striker that didn’t happen. That would now seem the wrong decision but if that striker had hit the ground running it would have helped. If if if.

As noted above, Evatt managed to find a highly unlikely fix for his left-side problem, and he managed to get a tune out of a Santos that many of us would willingly have had shot. But he has also made obvious errors, not least the lack of competition in the one area you can’t bodge a fix for: goalkeeper. Not signing another might have been partly Phoenix but dropping Alexander is entirely Evatt and calling out Crellin is entirely Evatt. There’s lots that’s wrong.

[Bertie Wooster]

I'm absolutely baffled by Evatt's post match comment that Mansfield have a budget twice as much as ours - how can that possibly be ?

They are either breaking the salary cap substantially or we are penny pinching and are nowhere the salary cap limit.

[Bruce Rioja]

I'm absolutely baffled by Evatt's post match comment that Mansfield have a budget twice as much as ours - how can that possibly be ?

They are either breaking the salary cap substantially or we are penny pinching and are nowhere the salary cap limit.

Or Evatt's talking absolute bollocks. I know where my Fiver's going.

[BWFC_Insane]

Manager saying majority of squad aren't pulling their weight. Captain doing likewise. Not sure there is a repair for this. Its looked an unhappy camp and now patently reveals itself to be one. You don't play as poorly as we are without some fairly major issues behind the scenes.

So - what are the options - I'm unconvinced Evatt has the skills or know how to pull this round this season. He might have learned enough to dispense with the lazy ones in the summer and build better next season. But do we wait for that? Between him and Phoenix they've clearly bought a load of players in just happy to pick up their cheques. I guess when one proclaims their major reason for joining is because its ''near 'is house innit' you probably can't say this is a great surprise.

Where from here? New manager probably doesn't fix the issues there - UNLESS you could tempt a really old and experienced bloke in short term who's been round the block and knows how to deal with these wankers.....

[nicholaldo]

I'm absolutely baffled by Evatt's post match comment that Mansfield have a budget twice as much as ours - how can that possibly be ?

They are either breaking the salary cap substantially or we are penny pinching and are nowhere the salary cap limit.

I don't know their financial position, but we had a substantial amount of debt to repay at the time of the takeover.

I doubt their budget is twice ours, though.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

I'm absolutely baffled by Evatt's post match comment that Mansfield have a budget twice as much as ours - how can that possibly be ?

They are either breaking the salary cap substantially or we are penny pinching and are nowhere the salary cap limit.

I don't know their financial position, but we had a substantial amount of debt to repay at the time of the takeover.

I doubt their budget is twice ours, though.

Have they spent any transfer fees? I don’t know, but I do know we aren’t allowed to.

Definitely deflection though, either way.

[GhostoftheBok]

On the financial thing, we have a good number of players in the squad who would have been either in non-league or unemployed at this stage - so our wage budge should be lowish on that front, unless we are paying Doyle, Sarce etc 3-4 times what they used to earn at this level. I've said before that I have no clue what our budgets are, but if this squad is at the higher end in this league then someone has made a real mess of things. Given that we have supposedly had players walk out because they think we were lowballing them I'd assume we've tried to keep things tight on that end.