Town Taking Shape

Saturday saw my first trip to the Shay this year (holidays getting in the way of the two earlier friendlies) and how lucky was I , it was a big game against the mighty Accrington. You realise how far you have fallen when you look up such a distance to Accy, a team who themselves are only too familiar with the task of rebuilding from ground zero.

The game was as you would expect, pretty uneventful and disjointed with both teams trying out as many players as they could fit in each of their respective dressing rooms. A 3-1 victory for our Lancastrian visitors told us very little really and didn't really reflect the game in any way. It was a pretty even, with Town taking an early lead via an unstoppable James Dean header from a well placed Mark Peers free kick. A couple of sloppy individual defensive errors proved to be the difference between the sides rather than fitness, skill or footballing genius. As they always say, the result didn't matter.

Dean is looking like a the key signing and will no doubt be a big hit in Unibond 1. In the middle Baker and Phelan continue to look good, both proving that they were obvious players to retain from the ill fated Vince era. In Peers and Whitehouse the Shaymen have two quick wide players who, if used well, will provide a solid supply line that Unibond defences will struggle to cope with. At the back it is clear that better fitness, increased mobility and a little bit more intelligence has been brought into the squad again at a skill level beyond our current league.

At this early stage it looks like Neil Aspin is building a solid, fit, organised and capable enough team. There are no obvious show ponies this time around and the consequently the workrate has visibly increased, which has to be one of the keys to improving on last season. You already get a sense that the team respect Aspin and as we found out to our cost last season, if a manager doesn't have that completely from his players they will fall apart and he will fail – no matter how decent a man he is. The slight concern I have at this very early stage is the size of the squad that he is looking to build – he is suggesting around 16 players will do the trick, but my recent experience of non league football tells me that he may be being a little optimistic. Having said that, the prospect of a settled starting line up is an appealing one so it will be interesting to see how things pan out.

There was of course another team involved in yesterday's warm up, Accrington Stanley (said in the compulsory scouse accent a la annoying 80's milk add ). Based on this showing poor old Spaccy clearly don't have a hope in hell in the coming season. It really felt that they had found their level playing against our pub league team. Their dozen or so fans (christ its only 26 miles away – Garforth brought more) draped those annoying flags all over our stand – 'Pride in the shirt not ££££ in the wallet' one banner said. What else could Stanley fans say? They are skint, they have no support and buy most of their players from Poundstretcher. If they wanted a truly honest a flag then something along the lines of 'We are ASFC and we are totally f***ed' would work better (I am sure if they ask our commercial staff nicely have some left over in our club shop from a couple of seasons back, they will just need to die them and change the name, it will only cost a few bob). You do for a moment feel for these lost souls who have so much in common with us, but then you remember they are from Lancashire (close to Burnley), which entitles you to chuckle at will.