Rupert Hacker is a Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School Ambassador for Forest Green Rovers.
Carlisle 4 – FGR 2
They call the away fans’ end at Carlisle United’s Brunton Park the water works, and yesterday‘s game definitely produced some of that among those who made this incredibly long journey.
It was a horrible end to a game and I think it would be fair to say we saw some of our worst mistakes play out, giving soft goal opportunities against the run of play.
But (and there is always a ‘but’ in football or we’d give up) some of those tears from away fans could also have been of joy: twice we took care of Carlisle’s attempts to lead the game and the two goals scored were both top quality, each of them sucking the oxygen back out of the massive home crowd.
Fairly late in the game though, a red card for Mendy led to 20 minutes of increasing pressure and a (maybe?) inevitable third goal for Carlisle, the cherry on the cake lovingly served to Robbie Savage on his birthday being that final extra-time penalty.
The journey home gave us plenty of time for reflection and ultimately enough distance to reason that these kind of games are going to happen in any season, good or bad.
You can watch a replay of the highlights (unless you’re a masochist and want the full game) on DAZN where you can draw some comfort from the local commentary, which respected the fact that FGR were largely in control of the game the majority of the time.
The team also played in harmony with what Robbie Savage repeatedly promises: exciting football. Some people might say effective football is what won the day, but I think we have to ask ourselves what we want to see as entertainment, because if football isn’t drama, what’s it for?
So we have to take risks and sadly in this moment they didn’t work, or at least didn’t work when we also spent too long in moments passing the ball at the back.
Any statistics on XG etc this week though will hopefully back up a view that that we were far more the dynamic side today, and ultimately this was not a game where the team was taken apart.
If you do want to worry though, and we’re good at that, the ongoing run of horrible games continues next weekend when Boreham Wood come to the New Lawn. Who? They are the ones who have just slipped past us in the table. Moving on from that Rochdale moment, we really need to reassert our home game dominance next Saturday – and a decent turnout of home fans will certainly help that.
To add to the plus column ahead of that game, we now have Temi Babalola who has both mass and menace, with the ability to hold the ball in the final third and provide better anchorage for attack.
Meanwhile, Harvey Bunker makes it two goals in two games and again underlines the depth and breadth of talent in our squad.
There are teams ahead of us now in the table you might see as one-hitter wonders. FGR has potentially more tools in the box and a broader squad threat.
Hopefully we see that threat to the full next Saturday.
