A point wasn't a bad result here. The game was always going to be a difficult
one. The main thing was not to lose at Deepdale again.
Yes, without a doubt, Preston were pleased.
As for us, at the final whistle we all busily
subscribed to the smooth worn cliché that we would have settled for a point before the
game. And yes, a point wasn't a bad result. After all, we got thumped 4-1 here last time
round. But the question is, what if you start a game happy to take a point yet, as the
game progresses, it becomes clear that the opposition are more beatable than expected and
there is every chance you could claim the win? Is it a point gained or two lost?
Oh well, it was an enjoyable day out at least. Quite
how it can take over three hours for a train to travel from London to Preston is anyone's
guess, and the journey was predictably dull. Still, our friends from London Gas were on
board, en route to Wigan. We filled them in on pubs and asked them to get a draw in
reciprocation. (They didn't; Wigan, despite the mystifying presence of Benson and Bond,
won.) Much to the surprise of all, pubs in Preston were open too. We had three options
lined up in the centre, and the trio welcomed us. There wasn't a hint of trouble.
Arrived at Deepdale just before kick off. The stand was
full, the Clarets in good voice. There was the usual nonsense with seats to get through.
We should have learned by now that possession of a ticket with a seat number on it doesn't
automatically entitle you to sit in that actual seat. Bit of a pain, but not something
worth making a fuss about, yet it didn't stop one or two arguments between Clarets. I
tried to concentrate on watching the game, taking advantage of an unusual sobriety.
Preston started brighter, without actually putting
together anything like an attack. What worried me was our inability to keep possession,
and the fact that we were defending inside our own penalty area. We were doing an
excellent job of defending deep, but it was still too deep. This was reminiscent of
Bristol Rovers. It only takes one silly mistake, or one piece of bad refereeing.
Thankfully, Preston's attack was weak and isolated. Nogan, huffing and puffing to little
effect and brilliantly mastered by the now routinely awesome Thomas, was a shadow of our
tormentor of last season. After a while, the crowd couldn't even be bothered to taunt him.
What could be crueller than that?
We got behind our team. (At this ground last season it
wasn’t Ternent’s team; apparently it now is.) Now, Preston’s ground is an
odd place. I confess myself perplexed. I had understood that the construction of two new
stands was but a mid way stepping stone to the regeneration of the entire ground, yet
since coming here last season, nothing has changed. They have the two new stands on which
have been plastered the world’s ugliest floodlights. (Apparently it’s supposed
to look like the Stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa; it doesn’t). The two other sides
consist of an odd collection of mostly wooden buildings.
For reasons we can only guess at, we didn’t have
the whole of the Bill Shankly stand. (Yes, Bill Shankly, a man whose name is synonymous
with, er, Preston.) We could have sold more tickets, but they kept a corner for their
lads, who attempted to bombard us with derogatory chants, a strategy only flawed by the
fact that they never made enough noise for us to be able to tell what they were singing.
Meanwhile, the Tom Finney stand was a third empty and silent. Surely they could have gone
there? (I noticed, in passing, that the Preston support in that stand was concentrated in
the seats which are coloured so as to create an approximate picture of Tom Finney’s
face. The solution to the dip in their support which caused less than 10,000 Preston fans
to bother turning up to this game is immediately obvious: paint more people’s faces
on seats.) We won the battle to make most noise hands down. To underline this, Preston's
PA announcer would occasionally, during the match, shout, "Get behind your
team!" and "P-N-E." Bless.
Anyway, the game. Little had, I thought, a bright
start. He twice played perceptive passes to West, but the 'wing back' twice made a hash of
the next ball. Payton was at his immaculate best up front, but was handicapped by the lack
of a partner. Admittedly, Graham Branch was rumoured to be playing somewhere vaguely
around there, but despite the recent claims made on his behalf by his minority of
supporters, there must be hundreds of players in this division better at playing in attack
than him. Most sides will have at least two players better at playing striker. So do we.
Critics of Andy Cooke would do well to bear in mind how we have missed him. If our manager
considers neither Lee nor Grant as worth picking in his stead, he should bring in another
striker rather than let this grade one tart flounce embarrassingly around the pitch.
The half was rather short on incident. Can you tell?
Andy Payton had had the best chance, putting a fierce shot just the wrong side of the bar.
The ever-erratic refereeing of Paul Danson, a man sacked by the premier league for being
crap but considered good enough for our level of competitive professional football, kept
the off pitch atmosphere bubbling. A promising scrap between Cook and one of theirs never
really realised its full potential, but also helped. Half time was serenaded by adverts
over the PA and the introduction of some old player to do the draw. The announcer, not
enjoying the best of days, revealed this to be Mark Patterson, and followed up unwisely
with the words, "Mark started his career at Blackburn…" You couldn’t
hear the rest.
The breaktime verdict among the cognoscenti squeezed
under the stand was we could now go on to win it.
Ternent clearly thought and saw differently. His
decisive act of the second half was to substitute Little. Once again, the best attacking
player in the division would not complete a game. It was suggested to me that he hadn't
contributed much to the game. Perhaps this was so. But why does no one else find the sight
of Little with his back to goal trying to hold off a defender and win a knock down from a
high long ball depressing? Will we ever try playing to our strengths?
Mullin replaced him in a straight swap. This was odd.
Surely we were crying out for a partner for Payton. Branch was a liability. In one moment
that might have been comic in other circumstances, Payton routinely harassed Preston's
latest in a long line of dodgy keepers to mishit a clearance into his path. Unfortunately,
his momentum took him wide. Payton looked up and planted a prefect pass at the feet of the
onrushing Branch, with the keeper scrambling to recover position. Branch, a few yards out,
blasted high and wide. I'd accept that he has missed easier chances, but with the
goalkeeper all at sea the very least he should have achieved is a shot on target which, if
the keeper had blocked it, he would probably not have held, and there would then have been
at least a second chance from the rebound.
So there was an obvious candidate to go off for a
striker. I also felt we needed a second wide man. We had Little on the one side but little
on the other. There would almost have been a case for losing Smith and letting Branch go
wide. Smith had enjoyed a solid if unspectacular defensive game, but the quality of his
passes and forward balls had been poor. With Preston spent as an attacking force, we could
probably be a bit less defensive. Perhaps Armstrong should have gone, then. What was the
point of playing a sweeper behind the twin peaks of Davis and Thomas when there was so
little left to sweep? With both those titans in commanding form, what did Armstrong have
to do? I suspect he was more than happy with this state of affairs. On the one occasion in
the first half when he might have justified his pay, him and Cook conspired to make a mess
of clearing a ball into the area.
West, a player who underlines his limitations with
every game, could easily have been dispensed with. But there was one player, more than any
other, more even than the hapless Branch, whose continuing presence on the pitch proved to
be a mystery. Step forward (err, it's this way) Mr Michael Mellon.
If Branch is Ternent's blind spot, then major
corrective eye surgery is called for in his continuing selection of this alleged
midfielder. I was interested in keeping my eye on Mellon, as recent reports from games I
haven't been to suggested he was in the best form of his Burnley career. He wasn't here.
He was dismal. He was useless. He was absolutely shit, to be honest. Until his wretched
afternoon was ended in the second bout of substitutions, he did not succeed once in
playing a forward ball to the feet of another Burnley player. As he has been handed
responsibility for the attacking midfield brief, this was a serious offence. It is hard to
remember that the Mellon arrived with a reputation as a bustling midfielder with an eye
for goal. It is not immediately obvious that this is the same Micky Mellon. What do we do
to them? (Our highest midfield goalscorer last season, and chief victim of selection
policy this season, is of course Glen Little.) I know Ternent spent some money on this
man, but he needs to swallow his pride and admit it isn’t working. Either he has to
change the system so Mellon doesn’t play there or get someone in who can do the job.
I’d even prefer the King of the Lungers Lenny Johnrose to him. On this form,
he’d struggle to hold down his place in the Fruit XI. (Perhaps Paul Damson could
referee that game?)
We finally managed to lose him for Johnrose, and Cowan
replaced Smith. This meant that once again Branch had completed ninety minutes of
‘football’, while Little had not. It also meant that in a game where Preston
were now hanging on for the end, we were not going to use either of the strikers on the
bench to try to finish them off. And it meant that all three substitutions had been
straight position for position swaps. What did we hope to gain by swapping Smith for
Cowan, for example? I am beginning to wonder if our manager is capable of making a
tactical substitution in the hope of turning a good situation into a better one. We all
know that, if we’re losing, we can go from one to three up front, like at Wycombe.
What happens if we’re having the better of a draw, however? Do we stick with what we
have or gamble on something better? Our caution could cost us dear.
Preston had two late penalty shouts, the second of
which may well have been justified. It would have been unfair on us, of course, but might
have served to underline the inherent flaws in our over-defensive approach. If you
don’t have shots on goal, it doesn’t matter how one-sided the game is;
you’re always vulnerable to bad luck.
The only other thing to report is that Preston took off
Paul McKenna. No, really. I thought he'd been anonymous, but I bet those fans who'd looked
into his eyes thought he had a belting game.
The match ended and it took us an age to get out of our
broken seats. Not only do Preston consider £14 to sit behind a goal a fair price (they
clearly aren’t yet worried about the forthcoming collapse of football support), but
that doesn’t even buy you a whole seat. The bottom of mine was broken; the back of my
brother’s was hanging off. Between us we had a full one. He took away a unique
souvenir of his day at Deepdale: the metal bolt which had been holding something in place.
You see, the stand is a cheapskate solution to their chronic need to dispense with the old
ones, and it will take more than fancy trappings to convince me otherwise. There’s a
desperate shortage of space beneath it and not enough exits for a single tier stand of
this size. It takes forever to get out.
Regardless, onwards into Preston central at double
quick time and to the delights of the open Wetherspoon’s pub selling real Thwaites
Mild at 99p a pint. The rest of the evening was a bit odd, and at one stage the police saw
fit to remind us that as we are football fans we have no civil liberties, but as I am
saving that up for a rant, that is another story.
I do worry that I may be being unduly hard on Ternent,
as we finished this game in the enviable position of joint top, which is better than
anywhere we've been in the last couple of years. And of course, given the choice between
this and getting beat 4-1, I know what I'd plump for. But of those sides topping the
table, no one has scored fewer goals. We need to find another source of goals than Payton,
as without him we'll be stuffed, and of course his bravery means that at some point this
season we will be without him. Having paid due attention to the fundamentals, we now need
to start playing more expansive football. If we do, I believe we can take this division.
We have got the defence sorted. Let’s take our foot off the breaks now.
