Crucial Week.

[DaggerJoel11]

It's not really fair to use a small and strategic sample size on a player when he was our top scorer in 2021 and proved to be an asset if we played to his strengths - my biggest criticism is that he doesn't make himself adaptable enough to contribute if the system isn't orchestrated around him. He can be lazy, anonymous etc but is also a highly adept and predatory target man boasting a very impressive strike rate, of that we cannot deny.

Balanta also missed the entire start of the season when we were scoring goals for fun and brushing teams aside, yet in a similar vein it would be hard to attribute his absence as the reason why we were successful, and then his return to the side as the reason our form then dipped.

[Alan]

Agreed Joel. McCallum and Walker was a great partnership especially when we had Jones in midfield. McCallum and Balanta is too slow.

Easy to cherry pick stats for a period that suits to get at McCallun, but you could do the same to Balanta: we were top of the league after 8 games when Balanta returned to the team after being subbed in 1st match.

Our record with Balanta (W 7 D 2 L 5, or 1.64ppg) is slightly worse than without him (W 5 D 1 L 3 or 1.78 ppg) - one might say that Balanta enjoyed the benefit of playing 2 games against Dover who have 4 draws and 18 defeats from their 22 matches.

Whilst looking at Stats, in games Kenny Clark started we are W1 D0 L3; 0.75ppg and in games he has not started W11 D3 L5; 1.89ppg.

[Diggerthedog]

The 3 main strikers we have are all superb for this level, other clubs would bite your hand off for any of them. We’re looking at the wrong end of the pitch here, defensively we’re a shambles only have to look at why we only took a point on Saturday. You can’t expect to score at least 3 to win most games and when you can’t keep even a handful of clean sheets at this level after the amount of games we’ve played big questions have to be asked.

[A S dagger97]

Goals are being scored at the right end no matter what we do and we're currently the leagues top scorers so there's no concern there, but if we want to get an improvement on results then it starts with the foundations.
There's so many good attacking sides that have struggled through history based on the fact the simply can't defend and we look like a big culprit of that. You only have to see that in the top half of the division we're the leakiest defense and until we correct it we ain't gonna progress up the table because we're having to score 2 or 3 every week just to get a result, so we are fortunate to have the forwards we have instead of knocking them. Hopefully we will be able to find a solution at the back soon as we still have a very outside chance of reaching the top and sooner we sort it the more chance we'll have.