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It's always one step forward and three steps back
Been a strange old week, hasn’t it? I really hoped we’d turned a corner, and we had. Into the path of a speeding truck.
I was pleased to see Drummond, Fawunmi and Sutton in the starting XI v Cheltenham in place of Hammond, Scott-Morriss and Temple. Plenty were keen to see Sutton get his chance, Drummond’s pace is always a threat, and I’m not sure why Fawunmi disappeared after looking impressive at the start of the season. Has he been injured? It looked very much like four at the back, but what of the rest of the formation? 4-3-3? 4-2-3-1? 4-3-2-1? Who cares? Formation doesn’t matter, apparently.
I was a little unnerved to see a single magpie on the pitch early in the game. It’s bad luck, isn’t it? One for sorrow, two for joy. As it turned out, a bird sitting entirely undisturbed in your half for several minutes is quite a good sign, actually.
We were more attacking from the off and had the ball in the net 13 minutes in, which, in contrast to the Accrington game, wasn’t our first attempt on goal. Drummond’s shot hit the post and Kavanagh tapped in the rebound, but was offside. I howled at the injustice, being in no position to judge whether he was offside or not at the other end of the ground.
It wasn’t all one-way traffic. Hudson had to make a save at full stretch from McWilliams, who then got booked for going through the back of Fawunmi, who was ripping Cheltenham to bits. It almost felt like it had been a long time coming when we took the lead 19 minutes in. Appiah-Forson played the ball across the six-yard box, Fawunmi couldn’t quite get his shot away cleanly, and Kavanagh was once again perfectly placed to tap it in at the far post. Cheltenham, bless them, appealed for offside, despite there being two defenders on the line.
📸 Oldham Athletic
We continued to press, which made a lovely change. Georgia Stanway’s brother made a great save from Daniels’ shot following Fawunmi’s free kick. Fawunmi’s pretty good on set pieces, isn’t he? He delivered an excellent corner 25 minutes in, and Robson rose like a salmon to head it in, put us 2-0 up and get his first goal for the club. This was much more like it.
The game was pretty much sealed as a contest when Andy went to the bar not long before half-time and told the lads behind us (who were debating which one of them was going to miss a goal going for a piss) that the third was incoming. Sure enough, Suttinho launched the ball up field from right-back when Cheltenham were trying to attack, Kavanagh picked it up and made a great run before squaring it to Fawunmi, and he got the goal his outstanding performance deserved with a brilliant finish. Please thank Andy for his ongoing service if you see him.
Alas, that wasn’t the only goal he missed. Some sloppy defending led to a corner, and a decent finish by Willcox pulled a goal back for Cheltenham just before half-time. Frustrating, but we were nowhere near as frustrated as we had been at half-time v Accrington.
The sloppy defending continued, annoyingly, into the second half. Monthe conceded a corner by shepherding a ball out that he thought had come off a Cheltenham player but had actually come off Robson. Hudson made a good save at the near post, and thankfully Wilson put the rebound wide.
Fortunately, we regained our composure. We hit Cheltenham on the break and Kavanagh played the ball into Norburn in the box, who could have shot but played in Fawunmi, who couldn’t get his shot on target while stretching to meet the ball. Fondop came on for Drummond 70 minutes in, and Hammond came on for Fawunmi 5 minutes later, who got a standing ovation as he made his way around the touchline. I thought Hawkes was the more obvious replacement, but we couldn’t complain too much.
Hammond had the chance to make the perfect start shortly after. Kavanagh played a great through ball to Fondop, who probably should have had a shot himself, but he unselfishly squared it to Hammond, who put it well over the bar. Hudson still had a bit more work to do than we would have liked and had to palm McCann’s shot from outside the box away for a corner.
Despite that, the game was already realistically beyond reasonable doubt, but if anyone was still
feeling nervous, they could definitely relax in the 81st minute. Hammond teed Robson up on the edge of the penalty area, and he buried the ball with a fantastic finish on his left foot to notch up the first brace of his career. That’s more like it, lads.
📸 Oldham Athletic
Mellon was a little critical in his post-match analysis, which I suppose is a good sign? He thought the Cheltenham goal was a cheap one to give away, and at the start of the second half, “the game was a wee bit, I dunno, loose for our liking”, which I wouldn’t disagree with. He also claimed that nothing different had been done in preparation for this game compared to previous games: “no magic wand was waved today, Al”. I thought that was a bit worrying to be honest. How does the same preparation have such different outcomes in terms of the performance?
We rounded off a most pleasant day at the Bank Top Tavern. Shout out to all the bands who played, but especially to Latics fans Another Man’s Rhubarb and the Crash Mats. Support your local, and support your local music scene.
Walsall away on Tuesday was always going to be a tough test. They were unbeaten in the league, but of those 10 games without defeat, 7 had been draws. So, after winning 4-1 three days earlier, we should have been confident of challenging for at least a point, right?
The starting XI was unchanged, which, at face value, made sense. You don’t change a winning team. Or maybe you do, rather than make your 34-year-old and 33-year-old midfielders start twice in four days. Maybe it’s a little odd to say that Fawunmi’s only weakness is his lack of stamina, then expect him to play 90 minutes three days after playing 76 minutes. I dunno. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Drummond had a half-chance early on when he got on the end of a long ball from Hudson. It was well saved by Ward, and the speed with which Walsall then broke should have been a warning. Fawunmi looked dangerous again, and Crew was rightly booked for bringing him down as he sprinted down the left. The resulting free kick, for us, led to the opening goal…. for them. Ward easily saved Fawunmi’s ball into the box, then played a superb ball low down the middle of the pitch to set Sodje up on the break, Monthe couldn’t catch him, and it was a great finish to put the ball just out of Hudson’s reach into the corner of the net.
Five minutes later, it was 2-0. It looked on TV like Pressley was offside, but it was concerning that Monthe was left trailing in an attacker’s wake, again. It was going to be that kind of night.
We once again made no changes at half-time when things weren’t working, then made a substitution six minutes into the second half, bringing Fondop on for Pett. It’s such an odd tactic, I don’t get it. You must have in your head that’s the change you want to make, why not just do it at half-time?
The standard of refereeing has been awful all season, and Tuesday was no exception. Just short of an hour in, there was a goalmouth scramble from a corner, with what looked a lot like a foul on Hudson and Fondop’s shirt being pulled. So, the referee gave Walsall a penalty for a supposed handball by Fondop that not one Walsall player appealed for. Pressley’s shot wasn’t the strongest, but it was straight down the middle while Hudson dived to his right. 3-0, game over, fuck’s sake.
We should have been given the faintest glimmers of hope a few minutes later, when Kavanagh played a good through ball to Fawunmi, who was then clearly pulled back by Ahui when he was about to go clean through on goal. It was a clear red card, and our response, to try to press our advantage, was…to bring Scott-Morriss on for Daniels. Sigh. It was downright grim how badly we failed to make the extra man count, and how heavily we were dominated by ten men.
I feared our night was going to get worse when they brought Dallas on. I was convinced he was going to score. He was such a disappointment for us in the National League, wasn’t he? Great announcement video, though. His shot from outside the box in the 92nd minute looked like it was going in, but Hudson saved it to make the final score ‘only’ 3-0. Our supporters made their feelings very clear at full time. ‘Ten more years, ten more years, Micky Mellon’ seems like a very long time ago.
There were rumours on social media that Mellon had walked after the game, after Suzanne Geldard tweeted that there was no sign of him 40 minutes after the match ended. Turned out he was probably just bollocking the players, and, maybe understandably, wasn’t all that keen to talk to the press. He looked hugely despondent when he did face the cameras and was too downhearted to even have a pop at the referee and rage about the penalty, focusing instead on how soft the goals we conceded were, and how we self-destructed: “we just sort of blew our own heads off”.
I’ve made a tit of myself saying that Mellon isn’t the man to take us forward before, and I’m not going to do it again. But something is very rotten in the state of Oldham, and it’s hard to see how we turn it around. We’ve had three games where we’ve looked superb and won comfortably, and seven games where we’ve looked at best weak and, at worst, fucking awful. (I’m writing the Colchester game off as a freak comedy of errors.) I don’t know where we go from here, to be honest.
Well, where we go is darn sarf to play the team that’s second in the league. Christ. It’s the last thing we need. I’m not going, part-timer that I am. We’re going to watch Prescot Cables play at Bury in the FA Trophy. I can’t say that I’m confident of Cables getting a result – they swapped places with Bury in the league at the end of last season, getting relegated to the Northern Premier League West division as Bury got promoted to the NPL Premier – but I’m reasonably confident that the players and manager will get applauded off, and it won’t be anything like as toxic as I fear it’s going to be at the Hive.
Safe journey and good luck if you’re off to Barnet today. May God be with you, and may the team that played Port Vale, Swindon and Cheltenham off the park be the one that turns up, against the odds. We can only hope. KTMFF.
Written by Arlene Finnigan
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