Sorry to emphasise that, but the optimists positing that 'Adkins will sort it' and 'Nige has stuff up his sleeve' had better fucking well hope that Nige has something pretty fucking wonderful in store. I don't have to draw an outline in Berol Magic Marker round the situation shown in the pre-season friendlies where three of the goals scored against us were absolutely, unequivocally down to a back four whose abilities are way, way below what Sheffield United need to get promoted and more importantly, stay promoted.
Like most weeks, just a simple look at Gillingham's goals show everything needed to assess that Collins and McEverley will be the undoing of us. All Gillingham had to do was put the ball in the box at height, and those two were all over the place. It's beyond embarrassing really to consider people think we are 'favourites to go up'. We have been 'favourites to go up' for the past four fucking years. Consider also that in the past two competitive games at this level, we have shipped nine goals, none of them 25 yard screamers or well worked team efforts, most of them bagatelle chances whereby any experienced defence would have intercepted or cleared. I say 'experienced' but that isn't the correct term. We have plenty of 'experience' in the back four but we also have a left back playing centre back, a centre back playing his first competitive game for the best part of a year, a right back who has always been 5/10 and a left back who is actually a left winger, although never in anyone's consistent team lineup.
Since Adkins took over, the weaknesses in the squad have been right there in big fucking letters. We couldn't score goals, we couldn't boss midfield and we couldn't defend. The recipe for our downfall. Sure, we've signed Billy Bladey, Connor Sammon and a Barry Oddnob, but fucking hell ... does it not make sense to plug the leaks in the ship before you start buying shells? My experience in the navy that 'Command Priorities' as we used to call them, were FLOAT - MOVE - FIGHT, basically your warship wasn't much of a fucking warship if it was doing it's warship stuff parked, upside down on the bottom of the ocean. You had to repair the damage - plug the leaks ... fix the engine room ... and fight the war. Currently we are shipping water fast and not moving anywhere before we have even fired the guns. Nigel needs to take fucking note.
In fact, is it Nigel's fault? Yeah, partly. But it is partly the fault of the staff, the overseas advertising consultant opportunists, the twitter buddies and the board that the brief to Nigel when he took the job on wasn't 'ship out the shit first'. I refuse to believe, as cack as Doyle was (at times) and as unfavoured as Ben Davies was, they were our gashest players. We still have a busload of players who really, even Division Two would be a struggle for them.
It's a long season, Bladesmen. Today's massive wakeup call to the Adkins-believers shows that shit that wasn't fixed in the close season and the ghosts in the machine are still haunting us.
pommpey
