Reaction to the Accrington game
By Nathan Jackson
February 24 2007
It was a definite improvement on the home game against Hereford, but the Imps were left to curse their luck against Stanley. City's inability to keep clean sheets on the road is seriously starting to hurt our automatic promotion run as we've hit yet another blip during this season.
Although I’m obviously disappointed that we didn’t win, there are certainly a lot of positives to be taken from this game. The first of which is that we dominated this game from virtually start to finish, there were very few moments when Accrington were the team that were on top, and to say they didn’t deserve a draw would be an understatement. Infact, if the referee hadn’t kept changing his mind because of what John Coleman thought was a foul or not, then they wouldn’t have had a sniff at goal for the majority of the time. How many times was the referee going to play on before Coleman complained and a free kick was given, it just got ridiculous after a while. The set pieces finally seem to have improved, although ironically a mishit corner gave the Imps the lead. Other than that, all the corners were put into dangerous positions, and we should really have scored more from them but for now I’ll just accept that we’ve finally learnt how to take dangerous set pieces. The returns of Beevers and Forrester showed how much influence they have on the side, and it seems no coincedence that we played much better than we did when both were absent on Tuesday night. The only thing I find slightly iritating is that just like under Keith Alexander, the promised wholesale changes that were promised weren’t made. If we’d have lost then I would have majorly highlighted this. Now, there is one player who I feel I owe an apology to, granted his set-piece taking is still a bit shit, but overall I feel Scott Kerr has improved immensely in the past 7 days. He effort today was only bettered by Beevers, and his goal was not only well taken, but it was fully deserved for the performance that he put in. He chased down every ball, got a near enough 100% passing rate, and provided us with arguably the best finish of 2007 so far. If he can keep this up then he’ll be back to the Scott Kerr from the beginning of the season within a matter of weeks, I only wish 2 of his fellow midfielders could watch and learn from the amount of effort he’s put in recently. However, as much as I want to priase the team following their dismal performance against Herfored, the simple fact is that our inability to keep clean sheets has yet again cost us winning a game that we dominated. It comes as no coincidence that every time we’ve kept a clean sheet in 2007 has resulted in us taking 3 points. Also, the fact we haven’t kept a clean sheet on the road since October is very worrying. If we are going to get promoted then we seriously have to sort this out asap. Despite only taking a point and falling down the league, today’s performance left me a bit more optimistic for the season ahead.