84 years since Darlington won at Walsall according to GeordieSaddler - and today the Saddlers continued their impressive start to life under Dickie Dosh with a 5th clean sheet in 6 games following a 1-0 win over big spending Darlington.

WFC Rob was at the game and gave these reflections on the message board:

I thought we looked very average today but restricted one of the so-called stronger sides in the league to very few chances.

Westwood’s distribution today was clearly awful however I did think he defended well at times, especially at set pieces. Today made it clear to see why he is in the side - he is strong at both defending and attacking set-pieces. Whether that is enough to warrant a place in the team is up for debate, but he did make a couple of superb defensive headers today.
Roper and Gerrard were both very solid and personally, I thought one of them should have got man o the match. Having said that, Martin Butler did reasonably well feeding off scraps today. We simply didn’t get the ball into his feet enough.

Whilst Wright doesn’t show enough grit and determination for me defensively, I thought his attacking play was some of the best he’s produced. He put in a couple of superb crosses today which we were unlucky not to score from. The way he ambles towards an opposition player with no conviction whatsoever and no will to win the ball is very frustrating, but if he does what he’s good at as much as he did today, we can manage.

Don’t understand the hero worshipping of Keates. He runs around, runs around a bit more, boots the ball forward and runs a bit more. He often looks like he’s busy and I can’t criticise his effort, but I don’t really think he adds anything to the side apart from some fresh legs coming off the bench. Pead is similar, but he does run with the ball and look a bit more threatening going forward.

Fangueiro wasn’t a impressive today, but he shows flashes of threatening play and can hold onto the ball well.

I thought Taylor should have started the game today. When he came on, he played a couple of very decent balls through to the forwards and we were at last playing the ball in Darlington’s half. For some bizarre reason, he then started playing a lot deeper and we looked like we were plaing with 2 left backs.

In case anyone was wondering where Dobson was today (the OS said he was able to play), saw him outside the ground after the game and he said he’ll definitely be back next week. The gash on his forehead really is huge and it doesn’t look like all the swelling has gone down yet. We really missed him today in my opinion.