YORK CITY

The pitch

The quality of the pitch at Home Park was something I nearly commented on last week but didn’t. Hindsight, hey. It was pristine. I had at the time wondered if that had been a contributory factor to our splendid performance. I wasn’t the only one as someone asked me that very same question. My answer was “possibly”.

Our home playing surface is a disgrace. A pass made along the ground doesn’t stay on the ground. There must be so many divots that random bobbling is a given and in a split second it’s the kneecap not the instep that is required to attempt to get the ball under control. It makes for frustrating football. Football that is not entertaining.

On the Official Club website the announcement of season ticket details for 2014/15 is accompanied with the following, “The investment made in pitch renovations has paid dividends this year with a good playing surface throughout the season. There will be further work on the pitch this summer to ensure the pitch is durable for both football and rugby throughout the 2014/15 season.”

I’m pleased to hear that further work is to be done but the rest is some of the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard.

I am not surprised that, post match, the players came out and said that the pitch was awful. Because it was. And is. And probably will be for years to come. What’s the point in recruiting a manager with the brief to play attractive attacking passing football when the surface is conducive to lumping it and hoping for the best?

But “it’s the same for both teams”. Well of course it is. Except that such a pitch will help teams with a certain style of play much more than others. I am making no case here that the defeat can be blamed on the pitch. I don’t study the Minstermen and have no idea what style of football they normally play or ideally would like to play.

The Match

This was not the worst game I’ve seen at the Kassam but it wasn’t very entertaining was it? And to lose at home is nothing new. It happens with depressing regularity. But this game really meant something. It wasn’t as if we didn’t try quite hard. But I think York put in that little bit more effort and appeared that little bit more up for it than we were. (I know some will argue this wasn’t true.)

We had slightly the better of the opening exchanges with a couple of half chances but by half time I thought the visitors had marginally shaded it.

There wasn’t much in it throughout the entire game, but fine margins and decisions turn games and seasons. So should it have been a penalty? TV replays are inconclusive, but we come back to this time and again – was it deliberate? I would argue that well over 50% of penalties awarded following a hand and ball incident are nothing more than an accidental coming together of leather and flesh.

Unless they’ve changed over the last couple of years, the Laws of the Game state that a free-kick or penalty should be awarded if a player handles the ball deliberately. And a player should be sent off for denying the opposing team a goal or an obvious goal scoring opportunity by deliberately handling the ball. Deliberate? I don’t think so for one moment. But appeals sway decisions. The York players raised arms almost to a man. The referee pointed for another corner. The York fans who were immediately behind the linesman bellowed “handball”. At that point and not before, his flag goes across his chest. If the incident had been at the other end the likelihood of the spot kick being awarded would have been greatly reduced.

If anything they improved after the penalty was emphatically whacked past Ryan Clarke and we never quite had it in us to turn the game around. Previous well documented failings both collectively and individually, which had disappeared in Devon, were back on display again.

Defensively we were pretty much okay with one Jake Wright block in the first half being a stand out moment. But the full-backs once more looked ill suited to the other job they were being asked to do. David Hunt’s distribution was not great and I also recall an occasion when Tom Newey slightly miscontrolled a Clarke throw out to find a York forward had run about 20 yards to close him down. Somehow we weren’t quite doing the same. Again we built nothing.

In defence of our two bald defenders I’ll cite the pitch and the fact that there were likely no obvious options to make it easy for them to move the ball on.

The lack of midfield creativity was evident and the Nicky Wroe we saw wasn’t the one of six days before.

I heard post match comment that Ryan Williams had an awful game. But as soon as he received the ball he immediately had one marker with a midfielder under instruction to get there too as quickly as possible. There were actually times when he was at a 3:1 disadvantage. He should have done better though with a second half shot he screwed wide.

The other significant chances we had fell to Michael Raynes. I’m not a great fan of throwing the big lad up front to try and salvage something unless it is at the very death and can’t help but think that if the ball had been at Kitson’s feet and not our temporary centre-forward it would then have made it to the back of the net and not wide. But I can see that we still needed the ginger one a bit further back as our main string puller. Was that where he was supposed to be playing from the off? Ignoring the defence I thought he was our best player, yet we have plenty amongst our fan base who are always looking to criticise him.

In contrast Beano’s control had deserted him once more. True, he had no support but who did when they had the ball? Also there were no evident partnerships anywhere on the pitch other than the Wright / Raynes combo.

The Gloom

The reality is not what I saw on 12th April. That tricked me, but not wanting to be an empty glass man I went with it. Good Friday was the reality. Back to 100 lux.

Fact: Our record against the top 7 this season: P13 W1 D3 L9. 6pts from a possible 39.

I’d concluded long before the referee put a stop to things that neither side was anywhere near good enough for League One.

But the gloom is not just related to matters on the pitch. There’s plenty to worry about.

The finances: The loss to June 2013. And there will be another massive loss for a club our size for the period to June 2014 unless there’s a miracle in the form of a return to Wembley. Odds on that happening on current evidence 500/1. We’ve got a lease agreement that is crippling us and which we seem locked into. There’s an interesting thread on this on Facebook, a thread I may well come back to for future FV content. It’s a massively important issue for the future of OUR football club.

Meanwhile there’s a game on Monday against the side right at the top. So, no chance of winning there then. Oh, go on. A slight chance. I’ll say a 5% chance. Will I be there? Oh, yes. I support this bloody team.

SCUNTHORPE UNITED

The last time we travelled to Glanford Park was under the crazy times of Ramon Diaz in March 2005. We got a 1-1 draw. Scunthorpe went up. We finished 15th on 59 points. (That’s just three fewer than we’ve got this campaign and the way we’re currently playing look unlikely to get any more). The following season we all know what happened to us. By 2007/08 the Iron were playing in the Championship. That day nine years ago a scummy chavvy Scunny fan sneered at us as we got back in our car, “we won’t be playing you again.” Being well behaved he didn’t get what he deserved, not even verbals, but it stuck in my mind. But now obviously they are going back up and we’re not.

The friendly Berkeley Hotel, a brick roadhouse with art deco interior, had not changed one bit with its cheap Samuel Smiths OBB as it ever was. “It’ll be a draw today. We draw too many games. We’re not going up”, spoke an Iron fan demonstrating the ingrained pessimism of your average football fan. They had at that stage drawn more home games than they had won. He had not of course taken into account the opposition.

Gary Waddock has been Head Coach for six games now. We’ve failed to score in five of those.

I’m not saying that they’re not trying but it doesn’t look to me like the men on the field are willing to run through brick walls for him.

The only time we truly seemed to be going for it was when Ryan Clarke was given permission to join the attack for a last desperate effort to salvage something. His enthusiasm shone, his saves were at times exceptional and kept the score line respectable and for me he is our player of the season with no one else anywhere in sight. I’d be really worried of he had not signed that contract.

The defence again didn’t defend badly and it was clear why the Scunny fans had the jitters because they could not kill us off. For a team at the top they were not that great but without question they were better than us.

The goal came from a precision pass but we made the finish easy by having moved almost to a man across to the right. It was a tap in.

But we do have some quality in the Davids Kitson and Connolly and the chance they fashioned for Alfie Potter should have provided an instant response. Alfie had no quality and couldn’t even hit the target. Actually Alfie had a shocker. It’s not hindsight. I said pre-kick off that three of our best players had not been picked.

Ryan Williams is not a Fulham player for nothing. He is by far our best winger even if his form has dropped off a bit recently. In the time he had on the pitch he played one pass that was streets ahead of anything the out of sorts Alfie came up with.

A fit Andy Whing provides battling and determination in abundance compared to Nicky Wroe and Josh Ruffels. And what about Danny Rose our best midfielder? What I saw of him when he came on told me I was right in thinking that he should have started.

Waddock has said that we won’t give up. Looks like we did some time back. It’s largely been pitiful for some time now. I suspect our Head Coach thinking that he’ll get away with little blame as it is not his team may well have written this season off and decided to give as many players a little run out as possible to inform future decisions.

Meanwhile OUFC fans spend our hard earned watching nothing much in particular other than one painful experience after another.

It’s going to be start again next season in Division Two. Other than not flirting with relegation – a not small mercy – we’ve gone nowhere since our return to the Football League.

Talking of starting again Scunthorpe United only moved to Glanford Park in 1988. Although we know that seeing is believing there are reasonably advanced plans them to move into an even newer ground not far from their current base. I must say that the architect’s vision shows a much better looking ground than the one we sat in on Easter Monday.

Time to shut my eyes and dream.