When Your luxuries become necessities..

Before the season started I was quietly confident that we had made some good signings who would step up and make good some of our deficiencies from years gone by .

Our long tern issue has been that we have been reliant on key players who have injury problems and who simply cannot be relied upon to put in the minutes . Think what may have been has we started last season with a fully fit Chris Martin or with Jordan Rossiter playing 46 games. The same was true of Jack Hunt and Grant Ward – all players whom had the ability to propel us forward provided they got on the pitch.

The signings that we made seem this close season seemed to have addressed that issue in that we didn’t get anyone with long standing injury problems and so we could be hopefully that the core of our team with be able to play in excess of 35 games a season. With 5 substitutes a game it means that the Martin, Hunt , Ward, Wilson  and even Sinclairs of the team can be shielded from overplaying and rested where appropriately. They can if you like be seen as luxuries rather than necessities .

The problem of course is that we haven’t started as we hoped and the new signings are taking time to get going. We once again find ourselves needing Jack Hunt in the team and relying on Grant Ward for our creativity.

Things however are showing promising signs of change.

We as fans can see what the Manager has been saying and a fitter Omichere in particular looks a different player to the guy we signed and Lindsay has gone from a bit partplayer to one of the first names on the team sheet in just 3 games.

Forde is still off the pace and needs more time and whilst Sitouri is yet to really make an impact with goals – that will invariably happen with a team that discovers how to make chances.

Hutchinson now needs to step up .He seems to have been lacking in the physicality so far but then so did Anthony Evans when we first got into League 1 but the difference was that he was constantly on the bench and got minutes under his belt that helped him adapt. Hopefully Hutch  will go that way.

Against Charlton we saw what happens when experienced players stand up to be counted.  They lead by example and show  the younger players how to stop a run of bad form and deal with it. They are not the future though but have a role to play in helping this  generation through.

Senior and Martin will return from injury.

Moore will return from suspension and with Connor Taylor showing a good level of fitness then we can be adaptable and play according to the perceived attacking quality of our opponents. We can become acclimatised to the fact that James Wilson is not a long term solution to our defence and plan ahead.

Overall we can  go back to having luxury players – guys who are great when they play – but we are not over reliant on them performing week in week out. We will truly be  a squad of players and not a starting 11 with substitutes.

The players will get to know each other – strengths and weaknesses and understanding will result in intuitive play rather than overthinking  things.  The defence will know when the goalie is going to come for a ball, the midfield players will know where their outlet is and the attackers will play as one.

Hopefully Burton has come just at the right time in that on paper this is a good game for us at the right time as confidence will grow if this game goes well.

There is a fairly well know story that Alex Ferguson did not start that well at Manchester United and if they did not win a game against Notts Forest then that would be his last game in charge. Marc Robins – now Coventry manager – headed in to make it a1-0 win and he kept his job and went onto become an all time great.

Just saying .

All opinions are my own- who else would want them ?