Wanderers v Cheltenham (A) 12 August - Are we up for the Gold Cup?

[GhostoftheBok]

Yeah I've always believed in football that the less touches you take as a team the higher your chances are of scoring vs the same sort of pattern of play with more touches. So that doesn't mean just aimlessly lump the ball up. But the first goal was a ball direct to Ade who held off the defender a brilliant lay off and then goal. We could have passed it round before feeding Ade who would have had less space and their backline would have been able to drop off the block any lay off to Charles.

You have to make good decisions obviously. You can play the ball early and just surrender possession all the time. But I think we must take those risks more and win it back wherever we can should the worst happen.

It depends where you are and what phase you are in.

What Evatt is trying to do is move the opposition and sometimes that requires touches to draw players out.

Once you have created the space/overload/one-on-one you then have to move the ball fast to exploit it. It's that slow to fast transition that kills teams.

The issue with Evatt's football has never been the possession play in early phases, it's been players refusing the key pass (Evatt's "bravery with the ball" comments). We'll all be a lot happier this season if they've lost that fear. On Saturday they all looked like they wanted to make things happen, rather than being worried about losing it. That may come off the back of last season's defensive record and them having a lot of faith in what's going on behind them.

Whatever it is, long may it continue.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

What Evatt is trying to do is move the opposition and sometimes that requires touches to draw players out.

Once you have created the space/overload/one-on-one you then have to move the ball fast to exploit it. It's that slow to fast transition that kills teams.

The issue with Evatt's football has never been the possession play in early phases, it's been players refusing the key pass (Evatt's "bravery with the ball" comments). We'll all be a lot happier this season if they've lost that fear. On Saturday they all looked like they wanted to make things happen, rather than being worried about losing it. That may come off the back of last season's defensive record and them having a lot of faith in what's going on behind them.

Whatever it is, long may it continue.

Evatt: “Even in tight positions we managed to break their press at will, waited for one of their players to jump and then exploit the space behind them."

[GhostoftheBok]

Evatt: “Even in tight positions we managed to break their press at will, waited for one of their players to jump and then exploit the space behind them."

Inability to break the press was why we lost in the play-offs and therefore ultimately why we were not promoted.

Part of that was personnel and part of it was mentality.

If we can reliably break the press this season we will go up.

Fleetwood and Wigan will test us more, but on that big home pitch you'd hope we'd rip them both to bits. We'll see.