While the blog is undergoing one of its regular six month overhauls – hopefully moving to a format where the majority of readers can view the font size – there won’t be much of a Crewe report. In fact there won’t be much of anything for another week or so…
To be honest I’d taken my eye off the ball as far as the Crewe game was concerned, and only really turned my attention to it fully at about midday on Saturday – and unfortunately judging from the performance so did the team. Don’t get me wrong, we could easily have won this game, and had Jolley not got his bearings all wrong after rounding the keeper in the first half we probably would have, but the performance was flat, the atmosphere non-existent… from fans to players, we just didn’t want it enough.
Even after Jolley got us back on level terms you got the impression we just expected the winner to come without much effort, and that’s exactly the performance the players put in. Crewe’s second goal was as basic as they come, we just switched off from a set piece, probably thanks to a poorly timed substitution just beforehand. That momentary lack of concentration meant instead of looking for a win, we were chasing a point… and due to a lethargic performance we didn’t end up getting that either.
The Dons seemed unwilling or unable to pick up the tempo, and ultimately got what they deserved out of the game. Disappointing, as I don’t think Crewe really came and taught us a lesson, I’m happy to accept defeat if we can take something out of it but I don’t think that necessarily happened yesterday.
And do we need to take some personal responsibility? Even the sub 1,500 crowd for the Stevenage game generated a better atmosphere than the ‘effort’ produced by three times that number. The players should be professional and not affected by external surroundings, but they’re also only human… we’ll never know if the input of a few thousand voices might have injected the bit of urgency we desperately required. What I do know is it wouldn’t have done any harm…
Anyway, renewed blog service will follow later in the week, where hopefully I’ll find a little more time to examine a few of the points I’ve raised, before Crawley arrive to issue an inevitable spanking…
The Anonymous Don 