Despite the sad end to last season, it was enough to leave me full of hope going into the second season under Liam Manning. This time around, he would be able to make his own signings, have a full pre-season and make sure the players fully understood what he wanted to do. If he could come third without doing all that, surely the next reward would be greater?
After 30 seconds of the season opener against Cambridge, I was convinced we were going to piss the league. We pressed from the off and hit the crossbar through Matt Smith, causing an almighty scramble in the box and an eruption of noise from the away end (one of which I was sadly not part of, instead watching on a stream on holiday – good start).
However, that’s all there was to get happy about because what followed for the next 89 and a half minutes was a scrappy, lifeless performance devoid of any creativity and cohesion. Perhaps understandable given the squad from last season has been ripped up by sales and returning loanees, but it was still a kick to the stomach given the pre-season optimism.
Don’t tell anyone but I actually follow another team if you didn’t know
If that’s what is going to be served up for me in the professional leagues (seems like it is, more on that later), at least I’ve got some non-league football at Leighton Town to fall back on.
It seems like this is finally the year they’re really pushing to get out of the Spartan League and back into the *big time* of what is now either the Isthmian League or the Southern League (it gets confusing at this level of the pyramid). That’s the level they were at when my dad first started taking me down there after the northerner in him succumbed to the prices at MK Dons, and it would be nice to finally say goodbye to teams like London Colney (more on them later too).
This time I actually managed to get down to the game, officially making it my first of the 2022/23 season (I don’t count friendlies, so sorry Dons’ 4-0 win away at AFC Rushden & Diamonds, you were good too though).
They faced newly-promoted Stotfold, who I feel like I’ve seen a million times before even though it’s probably only twice. Leighton started quick and should’ve had a man advantage after five minutes, but such is the standard of refereeing in the Premier League… sorry Spartan League… Stotfold stayed with 10 on the pitch, for now.
Only a couple of minutes after that Leighton took the lead, with Stotfold showing why they were relegated from this league in the first place and producing some calamitous defending for Jack Harvey to take advantage of.
The visitors then went down to 10 anyway with a proper 1970s tackle being punished by the ref, but it actually seemed to make them better and until half-time they looked the more likely to score.
As usual when that happens though, the players probably got a few stern words at half-time and it did the trick, with Leon Lobjoit heading in and Matt Cooper getting a third late on – so late that my dad had just turned up to see it after doing whatever else it is he does on a Tuesday night (does anyone know, actually? I don’t).
Stadium MK return
As much as I love non-league, there is something nice about watching the professionals do it. That is, when they can pass the fucking ball to each other.
Realistically, I can’t be too downbeat with a home loss against Sheffield Wednesday, especially when it was only 1-0 and the goal was a dodgy penalty that happened closer to the corner flag than the box. Wednesday will be up there this season – I find it astonishing how, with the team they’ve got, they didn’t go up last season.
But, my God, if we could have just given them a game in the first half, that would have been nice. Instead what we got was a 0.00000001% improvement on the drivel served up at Cambridge.
Despite losing, it was the defence I was most impressed with. Warren O’Hora is probably our best player now, looking every bit as good as Harry Darling did last season and possessing solid leadership skills at just 23. I also thought Dan Oyegoke did okay in his first ever EFL start and Jack Tucker looks like he’ll be a good addition. But the sooner we can return to a back five and get Dean Lewington away from that left-back position, the better.
The second half was pretty good in fairness and were it not for David bloody Stockdale again, we would’ve got something out of it. Darragh Burns was lively and Matt Dennis, I’m sorry. I slagged your signing off a lot in the summer but you’ve proved me wrong already. Please, just score some goals though.
So, not the best return – and it wasn’t made any better by the fact that my dad had watched Leighton spank Baldock 9-2 in the FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round while I had watched ‘that’, but I sense there’s going to be a lot of that sort of thing this season so I better get used to it.
Back again
Three days later and I was back, this time to watch us take on Sutton United in the Thai Carbonated Energy Drink Cup. I knew it was going to be bad before I even turned up, hence why I only bought a ticket at 4pm after going back and forth on whether to bother, but the reality of it was so much worse.
Chairman Pete Winkelman was on the radio slightly before the game answering as many questions as he could about all the shit things going on around the club at the moment, and in my opinion, all of his answers were fair enough. It was also quite exciting to learn that Red Bull had actually enquired about investing in the club in some capacity a long time ago because I had always assumed that was a myth.
But the fact he had even had to go on the radio to answer those questions after only two league games really didn’t help set the tone for what turned out to be a lifeless affair anyway. Let me get it straight, I understand *why* the club did the things they did for this fixture, like only selling three blocks and in one stand, and only opening one gate, and not printing a programme. It’s all down to money at the end of the day, and clubs have still got to be wary after Covid. Also, all due respect to Sutton, because I do genuinely have a lot of respect for how they’ve come into the EFL and mixed it with the big boys in League Two, but when you’re playing that level of opposition, things like that just do happen. We’re not the first club to do it and we won’t be the last.
But God, it was so DEAD (I know it normally is, I’ve heard the library jokes a thousand and one times, shut up). And that translated onto the pitch as well as times. It was just a pretty boring watch, even if technically we were playing okay in comparison to the Cambridge and Sheffield Wednesday games.
I quite liked the line-up too, giving a full debut to Burns and also a debut to Dawson Devoy, both signed from the League of Ireland with a lot of promise. The one that confused me though was Zak Jules. He was loaned out for the second half of last season after barely getting a sniff before Christmas and after having his squad number effectively downgraded from 4 to 33, it seemed as though he’d be off elsewhere in the summer.
I’m guessing he thought that as well, because he certainly didn’t play like he wanted to be there. The body language was off from the start, he couldn’t make a simple pass (just like against Rushden in pre-season, where he was the only player I had a bad thing to say about) and offered absolutely piss all defensively or going forward. I backed him for a long time after he first joined to my mates who took an instant dislike to him, but I’ve now joined their side I’m afraid.
Anyway, we won the game 1-0 thanks to Conor Grant being the only person capable of having a shot, meaning he got Dons’ first goal of the season. Although there were some impressive performances elsewhere, the goal was the only real highlight, despite Sutton having a flurry of chances late on. Thankfully they didn’t score because I’d been up at 4am that day to drive to London and I honestly wasn’t sure I could stay awake any longer.
The aforementioned London Colney
Non-league away days are weird. I think because you get so used to what the home ground is like, you expect similar standards at the few away grounds you visit. That’s how it is in the EFL and it can be hard to disassociate the two when you’re following one team from each end of the footballing spectrum.
After successfully navigating the endless potholes on the 1/4 mile track off the North Orbital Road that leads to London Colney’s ground, I was greeted with a pitch akin to a desert, a clubhouse which was just a standard non-league clubhouse, and a ‘car park’ which was already full despite there being hardly anyone there and was constructed with what looked like just some leftover sand from another project somewhere.
After I’d turned around and driven back to park next to the fence alongside the pitch, I was greeted by a gentleman who said ‘you need to pay’, which I had assumed would be the case because you normally need to do that to watch football, but I had also assumed I’d be allowed to park my car first – silly me!
Anyway, after handing over eight precious British pounds, I nervously left my car about three feet from the side of the pitch, almost convinced that a ball was going to go flying through my window at some point in the next two hours.
By the way, it was fucking boiling. I’ve no idea how they actually managed to play a game in that heat – I felt like I’d ran a marathon after just walking to the only bit of shade at the ground. So, fair play.
I didn’t have high hopes for it being a good game given the heat and that I’d sat in front of London Colney warming up. It definitely wasn’t the best, but it was worth going just to see Leighton capitalise on some more funny Spartan League defending, this time with Kyle Connolly pumping the ball forward from just inside his own half and see it slip out of the keeper’s hands and bobble over the line to lead 1-0 at the break.
The rest of the game was played at a slow pace, justifiably. But it’s a shame that there’s no sort of statistics collection at this level, because it would have been interesting to see Leighton’s possession percentage for the first half. It must have been 75% at an absolute minimum.
They continued to dominate in the second half and eventually got a second when Luke Pyman headed in, and to be honest after that I just scrolled through the scores elsewhere on my phone – I’d got my eight quid’s worth from the first goal alone.
I wish I hadn’t looked, because Dons were getting pumped at Ipswich and had gone back to being shit after some signs of life against Sutton, and my Fantasy Premier League team dropped an absolute stinker too. Business as usual, then.
So what do I really think?
Look, I can understand the frustration at Dons. Four games, one goal, no league wins, and honestly, it wouldn’t be half as bad if they were actually playing well and just getting beaten by bad luck.
You’ve got to look at the opposition, though. Cambridge are a very well-coached team and proved a lot of people wrong last season by very comfortably being able to stay up. We’ve never played particularly well at their ground, despite winning twice, and on opening day with some key injuries and almost a brand new team, a 1-0 defeat is excusable.
In Sheffield Wednesday and Ipswich, we’ve played two teams who will be gunning to win the title, while we, really, are going to have to be happy with play-offs at the ‘absolute’ best at the moment. The second-half performance against Wednesday was okay and that seemed to carry on into the Sutton game, which I’d have been shocked if we didn’t win regardless of line-ups, form, performances etc.
I didn’t go to Ipswich – thankfully, because it sounds as though it was fucking rubbish. But again, they’re a top six League One team at worst, top two or three at best, on paper at least – there are games where, sadly, you just get outclassed.
In the long run, I think we’ll be fine. I’m certainly binning off my pre-season prediction of fourth for a little while because until we get going properly it’s going to be hard to judge this team. So early in the season though, you have to have faith that things will come good.
Liam Manning didn’t become a bad manager overnight (or three months after leading us to the play-offs for the first time in what, a decade?) and the players still here from last season haven’t suddenly become terrible either. Give it time and things will improve.
For Leighton, it’s non-league, isn’t it. Things can change so quickly it’s not worth predicting where they could be in the table next month, let alone at the end of the season. But they’re top at the moment and the squad, with a load of acquisitions from far higher up the pyramid (so much so I’d actually heard of some of them before), is the best it’s been in a long time.
I spent a long time not being able to watch these two teams regularly, even before Covid. It’s been nice to get to games consistently this early in the season and hopefully I can stick around and continue to be the bad luck charm I’ve always been for them.
natgoodlad.com 