‘The season’s not over because of Monday’

Well, Rovers’ Easter weekend went the opposite way of the original story, did it not? A Good Friday revival followed by our faint play-off hopes being killed by the end of the festivities.

Bury at home, on Friday, should’ve been a home banker. No disrespect intended to the Shakers, who put up a good fight, and as we know there are no easy games – at least on paper – in this division, but it’s a game we’ll have expected to win.

It looked like a well-worn story for two-thirds of the game. Rovers are on top, making chances, not taking them, and go behind. Quite what happened with Chris Lines’ attempted clearance, which went straight to Bury’s Neil Danns to score, is unclear even having watched it a few times back now. Maybe the ball got stuck under his feet, given all the issues we’ve had with the pitch.

The typical Rovers comeback then swung into action, as predictable as it is delightful. Kyle Bennett only needed one touch to take his marker out of the game and another to tee up Dom Telford, who lost his man, for a neat, side-footed finish into the bottom-left corner of the net. Bennett and Telford are two players that really tell the tale of Rovers’ recruitment this season, but more on that later.

Marc Bola could’ve scored a brace either side of Telford’s equaliser, and Bennett set up another couple of chances with crosses from the left, but then got fouled in the box. I say ‘fouled’, but he wasn’t. It was a soft penalty, a typical home team decision. So Bury, from manager to terraces, had a reason to be upset. But given the absolutely disgraceful refereeing we’ve had at places like Blackburn and Plymouth this season, I’ll take it. Page One of the tired old footballing cliches handbook states that when it comes to refereeing decisions, ‘these things shalt even themselves out over the course of a season’.

At least we haven’t gone the way of our European chums, at least not yet, where the decision would be reviewed by a bloke sat in a van in Uxbridge for ten minutes while the crowd stand about like lemons, unclear what’s going on in the game they paid to see.

Anyway, Lines continued the redemption theme and slotted away the penalty, and we won. With other teams also pcking up points, not much progress in the right direction, but no ground lost, and the play-off door was still ajar.

That was, until Monday. The Gasheads who spent their extra day off trekking north of Manchester in the rain got no reward from what was, from the highlights at least, a fairly even contest between a top-ten side who are shaky away and a struggling team who are regaining a bit of stability under a new boss. Rovers having a man sent off in what can only be described as farcical scenes opened the door for John Sheridan’s men to score two goals, taking three points and moving only four behind us. That’s some feat, given that they looked likely to go down when he came in.

No-one other than Chris Lines and the referee, Rob Joyce, knows what was said for Joyce to produce a red card, but for a player with 500 professional games under his belt to get a yellow for dissent and not walk away is a pretty silly mistake to make. Much has been said about this ref, as he was the one that did so awfully when we went to Blackburn in the autumn, but I’ll forgive him; he reffed the Conference play-off final and didn’t send Will Puddy off so he’s good by me. As is Lines: his second spell at the club has been overwhelmingly positive, and every player makes the odd error of judgment. The season’s not over because of Monday’s game; if we’d picked up a few more points before Christmas we’d still be in the fight.

Which brings me back to recruitment. As regular readers will know, I’m firmly in the ‘DC is God’ camp, but the way we started the season was bad, and that was down to having an imbalanced squad, which meant we had to change formation every game. Or, sometimes, two or three times per game. Obviously Liam Sercombe has shone and Tony Craig looks decent (though I’d say we needed his experience or similar before Christmas), but we lacked in certain areas and that affected the whole team.

Kyle Bennett, as mentioned, is a revelation in this team so far, and I have no idea how we got him on a free transfer. Obviously I’m glad we got him, given his start to life in blue and white, but before he signed we didn’t have enough wide options in the squad. We had Billy Bodin, of course, but he was something else entirely – a goalscoring wide man who cuts inside. Other than Billy, we had an out-of-favour Byron Moore and some raw kids. It meant us playing Tom Nichols, who we spent good money on, playing wide or on his own up-front as the manager used goodness knows how many different tactics. Now, for me, if you (reportedly) break the club’s transfer record on a player, play to his strengths, maybe?

Speaking of Nichols, I won’t criticise the manager or the club for his signing. His time with us is far from over and he still has a chance to come good. However, this season, he seems almost cursed with bad luck. Which is what makes the total lack of game time Dom Telford got (until this weekend) a mystery: Telford comes on the pitch on Friday and almost instantly scores. Folk will, rightly, say that Nichols had a decent game and did a lot of running, but given his season, how things have gone, how a drought affects a striker’s confidence, can you honestly say he’d have put Telford’s chance away?