Lost [ Tue 27th Sep ] v Coalville Town, KO 7:45pm SLPDC HOME

[NN10-Nige]

Last week I had a chuckle reading "Burgess determined to keep the spirits up" on the ET website, I was thinking team spirit? what team spirit? this week however, we have a win under our belts and I'm happy, give the bloke a new contract.

Jokes, it will take a win against a team in a better position than Barwell to get me onto the Burgess bandwagon, we will see if we can follow it up tonight.

Barwell got well beaten by the Poppies and if you look at the players in the Poppies squad, they would also struggle in our league, so you could say a win against Barwell would have been the minimum expected from a team with the outstanding Conor Tee in it.

[ParcelFace]

Embarrassing. Humiliating. Absolute shambles.

[NN10-Nige]

This...

Coalville beat Tamworth 4 - 1 at Tamworth exactly a month ago, make no mistake Coalville are a very good side.

We could have the most experienced manager in the world in charge of our team and the result would have been the same tonight, even I refuse to blame Burgess for this result, let's regroup and we'll go again at Hednesford on Saturday.

[Three of Diamonds]

Embarrassing. Humiliating. Absolute shambles.

Yeah, but what about the match ?
Seriously, I said earlier in this season if we did go down there were some green shoots of recovery. Not so sure now.
We need to be told if we have a budget that can compete at this level. If we don't then we build for the lower division starting tomorrow.

[YoungDiamond]

Not sure the budget is a valid excuse tonight. Any player out there on any money should be able to defend, tackle and battle better than they did out there tonight. Hednesford is a huge game, they have 2 draws and 0 wins from 9 games.

[NN10-Nige]

I said earlier in this season if we did go down there were some green shoots of recovery

Go down?? relegation?? how can we go from being in a position where getting into the play off's was ours to lose - to talk of being relegated 4 months later?

If we had got promoted via the play off's then talking about relegation from the Conference North would be understandable but talk of being relegated from this actual league brings it home.

[BartonRaz]

Any optimism I may have had for tonight's game evaporated when I saw the team sheet. That sort of result was inevitable, men against boys in every sense. Having said that, despite Burge's comments in the summer that he wanted to improve on last season's finish I think reality kicked in a while ago and we all know our season isn't going to be defined by games like Coalville at home.

Almost disgraceful in my opinion to throw Going in to that for his debut. Drop Hicks in to there, bring Tee in to the middle and start Sutherland out wide. Do anything, but not that. So unfair on the lad up against Kee and Berridge, the latter has now scored a hat-trick against us on 3 occasions.

Feel a bit for the manager tonight with the injuries mounting up the way they are and for a spell in the first half we weren't bad. But there needs to be an acknowledgement at this point from the club of the complete shambles that is our player recruitment. If the summer wasn't evidence that something is majorly wrong there, then everything that's happened since has made it abundantly clear that we're pissing in the wind. Whoever is in control of that needs to be stripped of it and if that's the Manager then so be it. If the board want to stick with Burge, and I get the impression they do (the contract might dictate they have to) then something has got to change in that respect.

To be able to go toe-to-toe with Coalville as their equal and then produce that less than 6 months later under the same management, with the same playing budget, is indefensible.

[davealbon]

Embarrassing. Humiliating. Absolute shambles.

Yeah, but what about the match ?
Seriously, I said earlier in this season if we did go down there were some green shoots of recovery. Not so sure now.
We need to be told if we have a budget that can compete at this level. If we don't then we build for the lower division starting tomorrow.

We've been told the budget is the same as last season, so unless every other club in the league has increased their budget significantly this year it should be enough to compete. Unfortunately the money is not being well spent in most cases.

Looking at tonight in isolation you could argue it was just one of those days where everything goes against you; injuries piling up, mostly in defence, coming up against one of the best teams in the league with two of the best strikers at this level. And to be fair, we did actual compete for most of the first half until their sublime second goal went in (albeit without creating anything), but from that point our heads dropped and it was then just a case of how many Coalville would get.

However, after the defeat at Stratford we all said the squad needed to be strengthened, Burgess included, and two weeks later that still hasn't happened. I'm desperate for Burge to succeed, but with each passing week I'm becoming less convinced he's up to it, despite the win at Barwell.

[real diamond]

We have a club that is just too “nice”

Afraid to make the difficult decisions is how it looks from the outside.

The whole recruitment process is a shambles, the coaching from the sideline is a shambles, whoever gave the manager a contract when he was inexperienced shows the decision making is a shambles (or was)

We have a new board and you have to hope that we don’t repeat the same mistakes and accept failure.

[fentiger79]

Weirdly enough I’m not that disappointed. It was abundantly obvious from the moment the team sheet came out that we would need a miracle to get anything out of the game. I think most fans thought that by practically zero grumblings or comments. Our already weakened defence became laughable tonight where it was a case of if you had your boots you played. Big game coming up and the only way out of this is with players fit and at least 3 or 4 additions. Nothing less is going to get us out of this.