Marcus Braddock looks back at the week just gone and to the week ahead
Last week’s football started on Tuesday with the visit of Blackpool in the CheckaTrade Trophy and finished with Blackburn in Sky Bet League One. Having managed to acquire a nasty cold I stayed away from both games and was probably fortunate not to miss too many Town goals and the ones I did miss were from the spot.
Wednesday night’s game against Blackpool wasn't bad for a 0-0 draw. I watched on IFollow and although the TV cameras don’t give the widest of views, I could see that we were in control of the game and never really looked like losing. We did enough to win the game though, so the result of the shootout was a pretty just result.
By my assessment, Blackburn away was always going to be our toughest game, along with the Wigan away game, and we got just the one point but I'm not overly concerned because your season isn’t defined by beating the top couple of teams. You do well by beating everyone else and based on most of the evidence so far, we can do that. I though that Mat Sadler’s comments after the game were interesting, it wasn't so much what he said but the way that he quickly turned negatives into a positives, much like the team do. I'm hoping we can do the same with the Blackburn defeat, we seem to recover well so this isolated result after a decent lossless run isn't something I'm going to worry about. Sometimes you just have to admit the other team was better on the day and move on to the next one.
The Ladies team were in action this weekend and hammered Florence Colliery 7-1 away with a hat trick from Charlotte Budd and a brace from Natalie Williams. It means that in their two games against Florence, they've scored 15 goals with one in reply. If you like a few goals in the game (and who doesn't) you could do a lot worse than follow the ladies team, they've scored into double figures a couple of times this season and score more than three in a game regularly.
The coming week is a busy one with a visit to the Olympic Park to play West Ham on Tuesday and then back at home again for a League One game against Doncaster on Saturday. I have to say I do worry about our League One campaign whilst we're playing in two-cup competitions. Our squad isn't massive and we don’t have the same resources or credit than the teams around us so it could be quite draining playing Tuesday/Saturday regularly. At the same time, I hate the idea of losing games to anyone and couldn't imagine prioritising one over the other, even though the league is our main focus.
Our other two teams also have fixtures this week with the youth team playing at Wrexham on Saturday at 11am and Shrewsbury Town Ladies taking on Tamworth away on Sunday at 2.00 pm.
COYB!!!