"...and you can shove Lindum away up your Colonia!" - Lincoln away (EFL Trophy) Tuesday 14th Jan 2025 7pm

[GhostoftheBok]

Stevenage should be beating Birmingham. One of those where you feel the "extra quality" of Birmingham will let them steal it in the end, but they're lucky it's 0-0.

[GhostoftheBok]

£20m striker comes off the bench for League One Birmingham to make it 1-0.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Wrexham win 4-1 so that's where we're going. Wiki says next Tuesday but that's not been confirmed yet, AFAIK.

Birmingham won 1-0 in their quarter-final - and Bradford won theirs 1-0 at Rotherham (hehehe) so they would be a possible opponent if we do outwit Parky's mob and their thousands of strikers. I believe the semis are NOT regionalised. The other semi-finalist will be decided tomorrow - Posh v Cheltenham.

[GhostoftheBok]

Wrexham and Posh will be favourites to join Brum and Bradford, you'd imagine.

Would LOVE to get through and get Bradford away.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Wrexham-Bolton now confirmed as next Tuesday.

[BWFC_Insane]

I actually think getting to Wembley in this competition would be detrimental to the club in the medium term.

Yes the appeal of a final is nice for fans especially if we can’t make the play offs. And with Evatt obviously there was no appeal to that but new manager if that’s all this season was then it adds a small thing.

But think of the cost for fans to go down. Especially those with kids. Especially those you also want to buy season tickets. And think that the likelihood is we’d not be taking more than 20K absolute max. Then asking people to pay what I assume will be more expensive season tickets for next season likely or at least more likely than not to be in league one again.

The club has quite a tricky balancing act now in terms of how and when they pitch STs for next season - I don’t envy them but another Wembley trip I’m not sure will help that. Especially if we were to lose.

If we are to get to Wembley this season for me it needs to be in the play offs.

[TonyDomingos]

Yeah, not too fussed about Wembley if it's not the play offs. Wrexham will throw everything at this: their soap opera needs a win in a Wembley final.

[Abdoulaye's Twin]

Always play to win, but couldn't give a toss about the competition. An unlucky defeat by 1 goal and Mclean sent off for headbutting Toal's toe would be a good outcome.

[BWFC_Insane]

I actually think that winning this competition is where it all started to go really wrong. I’m not sure it was a good thing.

That season we had Trafford and Bradley and I still think cold light of day we underperformed in the league quite badly with what we had.

The cup run obscured it I think. But we had a semi at Accrington that we just about scraped through against their ten men and then caught champions Plymouth on an off day. They went on to win the league and not give two hoots about that day and we dined out on winning a meaningless cup for a long time. So much so that people didn’t bat an eye lid at not turning up in a play off semi final twice. Like ‘well it was just what happens.’ Then it went and happened again at Wembley the next season.

That game for me in hindsight was a red herring that allowed the ‘trust the process’ nonsense to continue without proper scrutiny for too long.

[GhostoftheBok]

Always play to win

This bit.

You don't have to play your strongest team, but you do have to go into every game with the determination to win it.

We are now at the stage where we are leaving nearly a full 11 out of every starting line up. A full 11, if we include Matheson.

Get into them on Tuesday.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

After winning that final the rest of our league results were WDWDWLWW - 2.12PPG, equivalent to 97pts over the season. If we were dining out on it, it was fine dining.

I will readily agree that that Wembley win was the high point of Evatt's rein. It was also one of the best days of my life, and I've heard testimony from people taking their kids that it might have created some fans for life.

Also fairly sure Schumacher would fancy a chance to make up for his day at Wembley.

We should aim to win every game we play, and we should aim to make the fans happy. I don't recall Rioch, with a much smaller squad, throwing cup games under the bus to concentrate on the league. In fact, I remember us losing a Wembley cup final, picking ourselves up, going back and having a day I'd rank as even better.

[Abdoulaye's Twin]

Football is about memories. Wembley was a pretty good one for most folk. Sure, promotion would have been even better, but you take the good days whilst you can. If recent history has taught us anything, it should be this.

[GhostoftheBok]

After winning that final the rest of our league results were WDWDWLWW - 2.12PPG, equivalent to 97pts over the season. If we were dining out on it, it was fine dining.

Last season Posh came off the back of a losing slump to win at Wembley and then won their next 5 games in a row.

[Worthy4England]

I think it's a pretty tenuous link between "where it all went wrong" and winning a cup. That's not to say "better Plan A" wasn't fermenting in Evatt's head off the back of it, but that's not directly linked to the cup win. I don't care if we win this cup nor will I shed tears if we don't, but I do believe winning is a habit. Players could get injured in any game, not a prescription to turn out the strongest team carrying injuries, but if they're medically ok, play them.

I do think our showing's in the play-offs have often been not at our best - our play-off results are W1, I think, and we tried very hard to blow it v Barnsley at home last year, before a humbling, but then again, we didn't get to the Final, last year...

Feels like correlation.

[GhostoftheBok]

We have a Champions League squad (in terms of size), as it used to be called. It's too many players not to go full on at the cup. This size of squad assumes you're also playing in multiple cup competitions if you are Premier League side, but even at our level (with 8 additional league games a season) you need a cup to make proper use of 25 players.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

I think it's a pretty tenuous link between "where it all went wrong" and winning a cup. That's not to say "better Plan A" wasn't fermenting in Evatt's head off the back of it, but that's not directly linked to the cup win. I don't care if we win this cup nor will I shed tears if we don't, but I do believe winning is a habit. Players could get injured in any game, not a prescription to turn out the strongest team carrying injuries, but if they're medically ok, play them.

I do think our showing's in the play-offs have often been not at our best - our play-off results are W1, I think, and we tried very hard to blow it v Barnsley at home last year, before a humbling, but then again, we didn't get to the Final, last year...

Feels like correlation.

Yeah. Every era has to have a peak - doesn't mean it causes the decline thereafter.

I'd also say - that run-in team, with Trafford and Bradley fully embedded, might have been Evatt's hardest to beat (as well as him making some wrong decisions since).

Trafford's demonstrating every week now that we were remarkably lucky to get him (and maybe Markham *can* spot a player on occasion?). Bradley is also sky's-the-limit, so we basically had two Premier League players-in-waiting. But the defence was well-drilled enough to absorb the injuries to Santos and Toal by incorporating MJ Williams into the back three between Jones (in his pomp) and Johnston (fresh back from his own long injury).

In the eight games including Wembley we only conceded three goals, slightly spoiling it with the closing 3-2 at Bristol Rovers. We've never been anything like as watertight since - sometimes, but not always, covering it by outpunching opponents, but always more likely to lose those tight key games.

[Abdoulaye's Twin]

We have a Champions League squad (in terms of size), as it used to be called. It's too many players not to go full on at the cup. This size of squad assumes you're also playing in multiple cup competitions if you are Premier League side, but even at our level (with 8 additional league games a season) you need a cup to make proper use of 25 players.

We need a large squad to mitigate the injury prone players we keep signing!

[dave the minion]

After winning that final the rest of our league results were WDWDWLWW - 2.12PPG, equivalent to 97pts over the season. If we were dining out on it, it was fine dining.

I will readily agree that that Wembley win was the high point of Evatt's rein. It was also one of the best days of my life, and I've heard testimony from people taking their kids that it might have created some fans for life.

Also fairly sure Schumacher would fancy a chance to make up for his day at Wembley.

We should aim to win every game we play, and we should aim to make the fans happy. I don't recall Rioch, with a much smaller squad, throwing cup games under the bus to concentrate on the league. In fact, I remember us losing a Wembley cup final, picking ourselves up, going back and having a day I'd rank as even better.

This. All of this 1 million %.

With bells on.....

[dave the minion]

Football is about memories. Wembley was a pretty good one for most folk. Sure, promotion would have been even better, but you take the good days whilst you can. If recent history has taught us anything, it should be this.

Again. This.
I'd even argue that - as a memory - Wembley trumps promotion (bear with me....)

We all continue to want promotion and to grow as a team, but in all reality the act of winning promotion itself (unless winning again at Webley via the play offs) would most likely have happened during an away game where only a small chunk of fans could experience it, and we'd have gone up, likely get tonked every week and then come back down.

A day out in the sun at Wembley, and such an emphatic win, stays in the memory far longer for most folk, especially kids.....

[GhostoftheBok]

We need a large squad to mitigate the injury prone players we keep signing!

Not quite as simple as that, but yeah we sign too many injury prone players for my liking. Not doing so would mean taking different kinds of risks, though.

We just shifted one on. He will hopefully be replaced by Conway, who doesn't currently have those issues.

It's the same reason I'd probably keep Cogley, were it up to me. Ultra-reliable squad player.