FL2: Torquay United v Grimsby Town 19th Sept 2009

Although Buckles two substitutions looked ridiculous at the time having heard his radio interview I would concede that there may have been a reason for both. Nico was injured - Todd was looking a little tired at the start of the second half.
I would agree with Dave though - it seems that we have better forward options out on loan in the form of Green amd Carayol.
Unfortunately the manager chose to leave out his consistently best player in Wayne Carlisle and played Marvin Williams on the wing - he is not a winger, he is a striker and this is where the manager's problem lies once again.
Too many strikers and not enough viable options in other positions. Some terrible peformances though:
Stevens - again very poor - did not beat anyone all afternoon.
Rendell - terrible, does he want to be here.
Benyon - Plays better alongside Sills.
Wroe - appalling - seems to get picked basically because we have no viable alternative.
Poke - awful - what on earth has happened to him?

All in all it was a shambles - against a poor team missing their two first choice strikers.

I have only thought that Rob as I have read it on here, if you are saying he is a right winger, then why was Danny played on the right wing, when he has shown he is far better on the left wing.

Can't help you with that one, Dave. It sounds to me that the gaffer, and a few of his players, had a mare today. Very sad to hear we were hitting it long and high and got a couple of decent crosses in in the first half only for Sills to be on the bench. We play to his strengths when he's not there and don't when he is. The dropping of Carlisle is the most outstanding selection feature of today, though.

Boos from the final whistle Dave.

The double substitution seemed utterly bizarre at the time and given the final result I suppose many are happy to leave it as a sign of Buckle’s stupidity. Looking back I can fully understand the logic.

I think a big part of the problem in the perception is that everyone expects a DOUBLE substitution always to be a pure attacking move - change both strikers, change both wingers or maybe a striker and a winger. Changing two full-backs seemed weird.

I would imagine that the thinking was that we had to push our wingers on and push our full-backs on to support them – making a kind of 2-4-4 formation. I see some armchair tacticians reckon we should have gone for three centre backs. Why? Grimsby only had one striker – it would have been madness to triple mark him. When the onus was on us to pull back a goal against a team playing 4-5-1, the idea of pushing on the full-backs is understandable. Nico was injured, so with no Hodges, Charnock or Mansell the reshuffle on that side was as good as you could get. Getting more attack down the right by playing an attacking full-back rather than a pure defender was the right thing to do.

I do not understand why Carlisle didn’t start – we look so much weaker without him. Was he injured? I always find it difficult to understand how a player can be fit enough to be on the bench if he’s not fit enough to start. I thought that the tricky decision would be where to start Carlisle. Given how poor Grimsby are and how defensive they were always going to set up, I may have been tempted to start him at full back as the centre backs would never be busy enough to need Robbo to help out. I do feel that when we play two purely attacking wingers – any two from Stevens, Carayol and Williams – it leaves us seriously outgunned in midfield, particularly with Wroe under par. On balance I think I would have started with Carlisle on the wing, with the option to bring on a winger for a defender and push Carlisle back later in the game.

The lack of confidence in the team was striking. Both teams were very poor and you had the feeling that neither believed that they were good enough to go out and make a goal happen but that both were just waiting for a goal to just happen through some kind of error or fluke. You felt that when that goal came it would totally knock the stuffing out of whoever was on the receiving end. That is exactly what happened. It was happening to us this time last season. We turned it round then – can we do it again? Will this run go down in history as a blip or a turning point? I don’t know the answer.

When people kicked off about losing at home to Bournemouth and Barnet, I was definitely in “don’t panic” mode. I thought both of those sides looked excellent – far above what we had seen in the BSP – yet we gave both a very good game. No such comfort against Grimsby. They were poor – no better than an average BSP team – but we were worse than them.

The league table is settling down now. We have played four of the top six and lost all four – they have shown us the standard we need to aspire to, well above BSP. We have played three mid-table (11th, 12th,13th) teams and won two out of three. Grimsby is the first really poor team we have played. If we’d beaten them, you would feel comfortable. We didn’t – and we didn’t really look like we believed we could.

On the injury front, I wonder if we are really missing Damien Davey? I remember that in Leroy’s last season we constantly had seven or eight players out injured often with little niggles. I wondered then if that really was just bad luck or more to do with Norman Medhurst retiring. Are we being unlucky now or is there more to it?

Barnet and Bournemouth came down here and looked good, you look at where they are in the league and you must think `well we will soon know where we are when we have played teams around us at the lower end of the league` we found out exactly where we are " third last, relegation fodder, lacking any pace in lots of areas and with Manse out no full backs at all, the Nico experiment must stop, sorry Kev but it`s back to the conference with you, it`s o.k mate you won`t be alone because I believe Tim and couple others haven`t made the step up either, this issue with "oh we have problems in certain areas so lets get more strikers" has got be put right or explained because it doesn`t make any sense what so ever! The reason why Wayne didn`t start is because he basically isn`t a right back and said so, so he didn`t start at all! It really does look like the dressing room is in dissarray from what you see on the pitch!