Better get yourself together, darling

Ron Waller

Wycombe Wanderers 1 Mansfield Town 2

Two results in the space of a few weeks that could shape a season, says the man in front of me. Losing at home to the bottom two in the division isn’t in the plan. If there’s a Wycombe fan that’s not desperate for promotion this season, then they’re keeping pretty quiet. Things are starting to get itchy again. Itchy and Scratchy.

I missed the first sixteen minutes of course. I’m still working hard to adjust my matchday routine to fit the ticketing system at Adams Park, but there’s a long way to go. A mountain to climb. Arriving at 2.53pm, I might have expected to miss the first five minutes but a person buying three tickets on a credit card, who presumably had never used the fucking thing before, taking fifteen minutes to do so, meant that was an optimistic estimate. Wycombe conceded a penalty while I was outside, venting like a poor man’s Meldrew, apparently a lunging Gary Holt was lucky to stay on.

Mansfield look decent enough from what I can make out and you wouldn’t have thought they’re Conference Contenders based on the first 25 minutes. Soon enough though, a thinly bearded Sergio back heels to the man everyone insists on calling Woody, who crosses well for McGleish to head politely home via the underside of the crossbar. Half time comes, and it’s really mild today, especially for the time of year, you know.

And so it begins, and this is how it works. The second half kicks off and Wycombe have large amounts of possession on a bobbly old pitch. The opposition sticks men behind the ball, and Doherty and Lennon shuffle the ball between them neatly with little effect. The ball is played across the park, slowly, assuredly, occasionally a ball is chipped in behind and runs through to the keeper. Lambert makes changes, to the personnel at least, if not to the end product. It gets scrappy, it gets frustrating, and greying, balding Mansfield keeper Karl Muggleton has practically nothing to do. Someone comments that he seems to have been on loan somewhere since his sixth birthday. I think we all secretly hope Karl Muggleton’s life is more settled now.

Like at the Deathwish Premiere, the Winner arrives and everyone is truly sickened. New signing Jefferson Louis finishes impressively to send the away fans, cramped in the old main stand like it’s a Berks & Bucks Senior Trophy Final, mildly bonkers. Anyone who’s ever gone out later than 9.30pm on a Saturday night in Aylesbury knows Jefferson of course. He’s played for everyone, big Arsenal fan, always gets his bottle of bubbles in at the bar, and was once written off as an ex-Thame United player who did six months for driving badly when he wasn’t supposed to be driving at all.

Working well with Boulding up front, Louis has looked decent all day and yet he personifies the sort of player Wycombe will never be linked with again. There’s no glamour, no former big clubs, no famous friends or family, no recommendation from a media friendly name. Bit like Jonny Dixon really. Meanwhile, John Sutton finds it hard to make an impact up front, and Leon Knight works hard to no avail in replacing him.

The crowd head home, many loudly dissecting Lambert’s decision to play Holt centre-half. It’s hard not to imagine the press conferences for home games resembling something like Groundhog Day:

“So Paul, they got men behind the ball and we couldn’t break them down?”

“Pretty much.”

It’s not the end of the world, of course, far from it. Most of us are far more optimistic about Bury tonight, simply because the team seem to be more suited to playing away from home. It’s in the must win home games that you can start to see the play-offs slip away. But only a little bit.

We’re still very much in this, you know.

12.02.2008. 09:07

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