Why shouldn’t they receive praise for their attacking play? They’re our main outlet and Devlin is probably the team’s greatest attacking force.
Defensively, your message confuses me there - is it the tactical set up or the individuals? Others on here would seem to agree that it’s the way the whole team sets up defensively, no matter what keates might be shouting from the sidelines. My feeling is that he’s possibly trying to play the same tactics he used at Wrexham, but with a totally different group of players in a different league. In the games I’ve seen Wrexham, they had two wide midfielders who were excellent at tracking back and providing double coverage. We have Ismail!
Yesterday I think we were the better side until the second goal went in and then we just had the confidence sucked out of us.
Ismail and Jarvis had good games. Scunthorpe were that worried about Zeli that they doubled up on him.
However maybe an unpopular opinion but we got the ball into the box several times today from good wing play and they were met with 2 strikers that had absolutely no movement towards the ball. To the point where at one point Gordon made a run to the edge of the box and Cook stood and fought the defender so the keeper just stepped in front of him. I’m sorry but if our attacking game is based on getting balls into the box then we’re going to need to attack them.
My stance remains. We need a new striker as priority. Far too static and everything we do. I’d even get Parker back if we can’t afford one. We need to stretch teams more.
Well it’s clearly a negative piece of body languge to do that. I have never ever seen that reaction from a player to scoring a goal before - to the player scoring the goal’s own fans.
That’s reserved for winding up opposition fans, or being upset about something.
Completely agree with that . Gordon doesn’t look anywhere near ready for regular football and Cook didn’t get any change from the defence yesterday . There were a LOT of balls into their box but everything just came straight back .
Our full backs would have been slaughtered for the amount of balls that our wingers put in yesterday.
Yes,it is his job to coach the players he has. With one decent addition, those same defenders proved last season that they’re not that bad. So his one addition of was Martin and look how that turned out! The problem with the defence is clearly the way we set up to defend, from front to back, otherwise we’d have let in a shed load of goals last season, and we didn’t. The fault lies with keates, whichever way you look at it. If you have a certain group of players with particular strengths and weaknesses, you have to adapt to that. He hasn’t. These are average to lower average league one defenders but his set up and tactics make them look worse than conference.
Not sure if that was me you’re referring to (I don’t live in Walsall either, btw!) and you may well be right about getting the crowd going because no one can argue that wasn’t a morgue yesterday.
You usually see the wild flailing of the arms in the air to indicate a ramp up of noise, and the cupping of the ears kept for opposing fans, but it is what it is - in the heat of the moment and after scoring a decent goal, it’s up to Devlin and only he will know exactly what he was thinking.
Someone on Twitter said they spoke to him after the game and said this…
“Chatted to him in the suite for about 30 mins after the game. He said it was cause the scunny manager released him as a youth and he knew he would see it after … sounded like BS tbh though think he’s had enough”
Sounds like rubbish to me, you’d just do that near their manager. If it was just to improve the atmosphere then you’d just say so. Clearly he can’t handle criticism. Conceding 17 in 6 must have been acceptable at Ayr then. Thankfully they’ll all be going in the summer. And as much as I like him,good riddance if that’s your response to fair criticism.
