The end of this season is proving to be more frustrating than the beginning, a complete disintegration of form just when it seemed the Potters Bar game may have got things back on track, culminating in our worst home defeat in 20 years. If the squad has run out of steam it seems an even stranger decision not to strengthen before the deadline like most other playoff chasing teams did.
The majority of teams maintaining their push for promotion have built consistency over a number of seasons (Wingate, Enfield, Horsham, Hastings to an extent after their brief Paul Barnes misstep), or have supplemented that consistency with some considerable investment (Hornchurch, Chatham, Billericay). We're not going to be the latter, so we need to model on the former - but the shell shocked reaction from Hayrettin in his interview suggests that consistency of squad for next year looks shakier now than it did a few games ago.
The last 10 days just shows how quickly the wheels can fall off when everything appears to be running smoothly. We played three other teams with promotion prospects in quick succession at the end of an intensive period of fixtures, when those teams had a bit more breathing space between their games, and sadly we couldn't cope with that. Billericay were never as bad as their form suggested coming into their visit to Champion Hill, and they've followed that up by winning two more games convincingly. Carshalton looked a good side reminiscent of prime Hamlet from Peter Adeniyi's playing days with us. (That was also the case when I saw them beat 2nd placed Chatham a few weeks earlier.) Enfield have recovered from their own slump with 6 wins and a draw from their last 7 games. Perhaps crucially they have a lot of firepower up front. Two of the players who scored their goals yesterday now have 26 and 31 respectively this season, plus they have the big number 9 (who scored the third goal) who's just returned from a lengthy injury lay off to give a real physical presence to the attack. We were sorely lacking in that respect in the last three games, and the recent flop at Kingstonian.
These sudden slumps were an annual feature during our first three seasons in this division during the middle part of the last decade. I recall being in a three way race for the title with Wealdstone and Maidstone ten seasons ago, when we suddenly lost 4 matches on the spin from the beginning of March, ultimately missing the play-offs by a single point. The following season we again had genuine hopes of a title challenge after winning at Margate in January, at the height of their financial doping regime, but lost heavily at Bognor a few weeks later and the wheels came off. I think we only managed two more league wins before returning to Margate for the play-off semi-final, and unsurprisingly lost this time. The following season we seemed to have the best squad in the league on paper (Waldren, Scannell, Moss etc.) but had another spring slump, losing at VCD Athletic and Lewes who were both relegated. We ended that season getting blown away in the play-off final at East Thurrock with half the wage budget on the bench every week and cheap non-contract or loan signings in the starting XI. In the end it took us 5 years of painstaking progress to finally achieve promotion, although we never finished lower than 6th.
As was mentioned on one of the other recent match threads, the type of football we play under Hak (as opposed to what we played under Gavin) tends to look worse when we don't create chances and don't win. However I think there's less that can go wrong with a more basic approach and it's a bit easier to put right. Gavin used to drive me mad with constant tinkering whenever we had a couple of poor results, often making 3 or 4 changes for every game, changing formations, moving people to unfamiliar roles etc. Hak seems more certain of his best options to me.
Another thing I've noticed over the last decade is that teams who get relegated to this division from National South rarely bounce back quickly. I can only think of Havant, relegated in 2016, who kept the same manager and almost entirely the same squad and were champions at the first attempt. Margate (2017), Bognor and Whitehawk (2018), have all been stuck at this level for several years without contesting the play-offs. Hornchurch have just got back after 11 years (some of which were spent another division lower) and it took Tonbridge 5 years and Farnborough 7 years. Billericay retain an outside chance of getting back at the second attempt with what looks like a top 2 budget. East Thurrock and Staines went bust.
I was surprised we didn't sign any more players before the deadline (which was 2 days after the fine win at Potters Bar) but we already have 24 players registered, with Deacon and Ojemen arriving shortly before the deadline. Looking at the current squad, 15 of those 24 have been here since pre-season. Most of the other 9 have played relatively few games and not been regular starters, and It's hard to say any of them has really been a big individual improvement, yet the collective group has improved steadily since the early autumn until the last 3 games. Another 15 players have departed since the start of the season, 11 of whom were involved in pre-season, with 4 more coming and going since August.
I hope we don't have a wholesale turnover of players in the summer. That rarely produces instant results. Our best seasons under Gavin (especially the two promotion seasons) came after we'd kept all the best players and just added a small number of good new recruits. I think Hak has generally done quite well to improve our results by working with what he's got (albeit from a low starting point) and I'd like to think we can keep at least half of the current squad and build on that. You can't keep chucking everyone out at the end of the season and starting again from scratch, and whenever that happens a lot of the newcomers are inevitably no better than those they've replaced.
www.footballwebpages.co.uk
