[Devongone]

I am definitely NOT a genius. If I were I'd have known by now.

How many times did I mention Tshimanga as a player we could go after when he was with Oxford City? I'd only read reports and seen a couple of clips, but he was young, lively and scored goals and always seemed to be in the action. He wasn't going to cost anything significant. If he had cost then Boreham Wood, with a crowd never out of the hundreds, were never going to afford him. But yesterday he scored both goals against us.

We aren't losing out to big money, we're losing out to lack of effort.

[Dancingwilldoit]

Disagree Dev, we are losing out to very poor judgement and a touch of nepotism thrown in for good measure.
There are loads of good players we could have picked up for not much money from non league but for some reason we only seem interested in ex league players who will command higher wages.
Its what it is now but if we dont get a win on Tuesday its no good saying "The seasons only 5 games old", we could be 10 points off the only automatic spot which will take some catching up.

[spireitematt]

I've seen quite a few Northern Premier League teams and matches and the worrying thing for me in those highlights is the way we play, it's like Northern Premier League standard with hoofing the ball from the back and hitting it long up to the strikers and also taking long range shots and hoping for the best.

Leyton Orient drew their first 3 games last season

Salford 1-1
Ebbsfleet United 1-1
Barrow 2-2

Got their first win in their 4th game against Maidenhead United 2-1 then beat Boreham Wood 1-0. Their first loss came in late September against Sutton United losing 1-0.

Salford City drew and lost their first 3 games last season

Leyton Orient 1-1
Gateshead 2-1
Sutton United 2-1

Got their first win in their 4th game against Halifax 2-1 and then beat us 3-2. Their next loss was at the beginning of December where they lost 2-0 to us.

After 4 games in the league. Leyton Orient were 10th with 6pts and Salford were 14th with 4pts.

[SaltergateBorn]

Good research, Matt.

I agree that it`s far too early to write off the season yet and I still fancy us to reach the play-offs. Plenty of teams have made a stuttering start to the season and then got it together; you don`t have to go back 50 years, Dev. By the same token, teams have won their first 3 games and then been in the bottom 4 within a couple of months. (I seem to remember a team in this league doing that very thing last season; who could that have been?)

I saw the Dover game and have watched the highlights you uploaded, Matt, and have to say that on the basis of these I don`t entirely agree with you about the quality of the football that we`re playing this season, which to me is a marked improvement on what we saw in the early part of last season (I`m sure Dancing will corroborate). The first half against Dover was very poor, but I always felt that we were TRYING to play decent football – we weren`t at this time last year -it`s just that we couldn`t quite manage it.

I think you have to remember as well that this is the National League. I have fond memories myself of the quality of football we played under Paul Cook in League 1 and what we play nowadays just doesn`t bear comparison, but for now at least those days are gone. This is the National League and I just don`t think tikka-takka football would work at this level.

I know it`s difficult to judge a game on the basis of edited highlights, but from what I saw in the Boreham Wood video I was quite encouraged. Even when we were down to 10 men, we seemed to create as many chances as they did and, again, we looked as though we were trying to play football and maybe deserved to win the game overall. The penalty looked to be a 50/50 shout between a penalty and a yellow card for simulation to my thinking (yes, I know I`m biased) and the red card was ridiculous. I`ve watched it 4 times over now (yes, I know referees don`t have that privilege) and I`m not convinced I even see it as a free-kick. The report I read said it was a `high tackle’ and whatever it was or wasn`t it certainly wasn`t that.

You may be right about Tshimanga, Dev, but I don`t think you can read too much into his 2 `goals’ in this game. The first was the aforesaid penalty and the second was a very speculative shot (or was it a cross?) that would have gone nowhere near the goal if it hadn`t taken a wicked deflection; I`m amazed that`s not been given as an og.

Anyway, after 3 games my razor still hasn`t gone anywhere near my wrists – or my throat – and I`m still reasonably optimistic about the season to come.

[Devongone]

So Tshimanga made and scored the penalty, scored the second and made team of the week in the Non-League Paper, so somebody thought he did more than just get on the end of two lucky moments. And he had a lot of moments for me not to read much into with a moderate Oxford City side last season that he and his goals kept halfway up the division.

I might also yet again mention Nassim L'Ghoul who is yet to start for Dover, but on Saturday was Man of the Match having turned the game round for his side in the thirty minutes he was on the field. His form last season shouted out for a bigger club to come in, but Dover, who have no money, got him. He might not have wanted to move north, but as he's French I'm guessing it was football he was after not the white cliffs.

Like Dancing I think we are suffering from Andre-Previn syndrome. We're looking for all the wrong players in all the wrong places.

Unfortunately combining the very different Orient and Salford experiences makes Matt's research uninformative in my opinion. All they had in common was promotion. Salford were new to the division, Orient had had a year getting used to it. Neither flew out of the traps, which we were surely aware of as we trapped and soon tripped. The most significant point about Orient is they did not lose until September, so they had played double figures in games BEFORE they lost one.

I don't hold out great hopes for us. I do hope our manager can overcome his own stubbornness and quickly admit that his team needs reinforcements from outside the EFL, but I'm not holding my breath. It looks to me as though we wasted the close season. Our recent experience suggests if we're struggling after the first ten games, then we go down. By Saturday night we'll have played five. And throw in the extra worry that EFL teams can still make signings and rumours are that huge teams with crowds of up to 10,000 are viewing Boden, one of our very few assets.

The way back to the EFL is not going off to a quick or slow start, it is recruiting well and making a team from players eager to prove themselves. How many of our players feel the need to prove themselves, and how many are just serving out their remaining years in the game?

[Devongone]

As for Jalal's Shirley Temple punch for their first goal, crikey the ball was hanging in the wind, he didn't move his feet at all, didn't essay leaving the ground, about as convincing as George in Poldark.

The skin on a rice pudding need have no fears when served up to Shwan.

And since you are wondering, yes I think Tshimanga and Boden together would have created a hell of a lot of problems for defences on the evidence of that game.