Lloydy - you may be forgetting Davison, Appiah, wardrobes, Sheringham...

Great blog Bush. Do we have a breakdown of results of 352 v 343 and goals scored/against?

Great read Bush - if we continue to persevere with 5-2-3 then Stevens can't start. It's not his game and we are better off giving Foyo or Sasu a game. I would like us to return to 5-3-2 tomorrow, get Tilley and Josh high and stick Hutchinson in for Reeves. The second half of the season has been really frustrating. The automatics have been up for grabs but our form has tanked. We are now in the bottom half for form in the last 10 games. We have not been able to put teams away except Notts County and the football has been hard to watch. It's a shame because I think we have some decent players for this league. Cope has done an excellent job since coming in, there are have been very few duds and the ones that have been are in attacking positions. I just don't think Jackson knows how to use Pigott, he isn't a target man and that's what he is being asked to do. Kelly is someone who plays off the last defender and will run behind teams, we don't play that football. We have resorted to hoof ball in the second half of the season and need a big lump.

Jackson’s not a poor manager, he’s a limited one. Deeply conservative and intent on boring the opposition to death.

Jackson is a poor manager as he has no natural instinct to change things when they are not going well. He has done well with a manage by numbers approach to a plan A with pre arranged subs at a particular moment. However the moment we go behind, or need to break down a team that has worked out our plan he has no clue. He also has a very unfortunate bias to his favourites that get picked whatever form they are in.

Yes, as I said, Cope has been overall positive. But in certain key areas, recruitment has failed - i.e we have two forwards that average one goal every four months - and that looks like being costly.

The positive with Cope is he has had more hits than misses. You’re never going to have a 100% success rate on signings whatever your budget.

PS - in case you missed it yesterday (and if of interest), blog on Matty Stevens, lack of goals and reasons for it: [Link]

Interesting discussion. I've never quite bought the argument you sometimes see that we have an elite L2 squad that would walk the lead with a different manager. IMO we've assembled a very solid L2 squad but I'm not sure there be lots of interest in many of our players from higher level teams (Josh N and Lewis possible exceptions). Our strengths are more about the collective stuff - esp. defensive organisation - than individuals this season IMO. And credit for that is down to the coaching staff. Though clearly we've been short going forward for some time which is disappointing given how close we are to top 3. I do think recruitment since Cope arrived has been good though. Lewis, Johnson, Harbottle, Tilley, Neufville, Reeves, Smith, Maycock, Stevens, Bugiel all been good signings (not without faults/limitations but overall good).

Entertaining players cost though….think a case of budget and injuries (Hippo) held us back from attacking sense

Obviously cope has brought in an upgrade in players last few years compared to before. Solid players.just a shame that jackson can't mold them to a good entertaining footballing team instead of a bore football team.. 20 clean sheet amazing, 13 league games not scoring not so..

I agree the direct style doesn’t suit Kelly but there are plenty of moments in every game he’s played where it’s played to his feet and he just hasn’t delivered. The reason why we may miss out on autos is because him, Bugiel and other subs haven’t delivered close to what they should. Sadly Kelly so far been the biggest flop record signing in AFCW history. The fee not his fault but blame does need to go to Cope (who overall has done a great job) and player himself. We’ve all just got to hope Kelly and co contribute over the next few games (starting or from bench) as it’s been massively overdue given faith put into them by management

How many players have we signed form Solihull ?? I can only think of 2 - so hardly a bias really

Marcus Browne is the best and the worst of our club. He can score but he's selfish and won't pass to someone else to score. I'll happily say goodbye and good luck

KD- fair enough- to be honest it’s probably a bit of both. Perhaps it’s just that my starting point is the relegation side - though that season combined our worst ever league manager and our worst ever player recruitment, so it’s tricky to disentangle exactly what is behind the improvement from that nadir.

I’m more inclined to give Jackson the credit TBH. It’s absolutely fucking tedious football, but, in this complete and utter dogshit league, his defensive rigour goes quite far - even if he is absolutely clueless about attacking play.

KD- as I say, it’s all a matter of opinion, and not something that can be proved objectively, but for a start it seems to me that our loans in have improved beyond all recognition. I suppose it comes back to the question; if our improved league position over the last couple of years isn’t down to better player recruitment then to what else do we ascribe it?

Cope’s bias towards Solihull players hasn’t really worked put (sad for me as I was born in Solihull!). Signing a former player in Pigott hasn’t worked out. Keepers are Bayzo’s thing. The jury’s out on ‘fallen stars’ like Marcus Browne. So what is it that’s so marvellous about Craig Cope?

There is a massive range of ability between someone with a “Midas touch” in player recruitment and the standard that we had before CC joined (which was utterly abysmal)- clearly CC falls somewhere within that range and how you describe the extent of improvement is really matter of mindset (ie how enthusiastic you want to appear).

The groupthink is Cope has some sort of Midas touch. I abhor groupthink. That’s not to say Cope hasn’t been an overall plus, but he’s overrated in my view.

KD- if you don’t think that our recruitment is much better now than in the relegation season (when we essentially had no good signings at al, so you couldn’t take your line of line “for every [ insert name of success] there is a [insert name of failure]” as there was nobody in the first category, then I think that we will just have to agree to disagree. The fact is that (at a high level) there are really only 3 things which drive league position (1) relative budget (2) quality of recruitment (3) coaching- as a matter of fact, we have improved our league position in the last couple of years but our budget is no better in relative terms and there doesn’t seem to be a view that JJ is a particularly excellent coach, so I think that, by a process of elimination, it must reflect better recruiting (even if that is just avoiding the Mebude/ Henry Lawrence-style disasters)

Porthcawl the difference is Davison was playing as the goal scorer. These 2 are playing as providers and as I said earlier, we have 10 less goals than our opponents BUT the same attacking stats. We’re creating plenty enough chances from the guys like Bugiel and Kelly but we’re 10 short of finishing them. Those 10 would be automatic promotion.

Smith has improved the last few games but I think for most of the season Hippolyte would have affected games more than him.

I think at the minute we have two Josh Davidson's in Kelly and Bugiel running round a lot with no end result

Sorry - Minute 3 onwards.