1874 News Widnes match information

[Andy]

Everyone keeps forgetting, we finished 1 point above the relegation spots last season.

And that was despite being 4th in October.

But around last Christmas something changed, and it has been awful since.

In hindsight, Goodison and Bowyer should have gone last summer. Giving a new manager real time to make changes.

DC has come in to a depleted squad with no confidence. Not sure there is a lot he can do in this position to save the season.

 

[MarkDavies89]

I feel that it's a bit disingenuous to say that we were one point off the relegation spots last season when the situation has changed this year.

We finished 14th.
We were one point and 3 positions above a relegation playoff place that was reprieved.
We were 6 points above the actual relegation playoff.
We were 8 points above the automatic relegation places and 18 points off bottom.

We had a few injuries to key players that were difficult to replace - Kenzie breaking his foot vs Skelmersdale on 4/2 and missing the rest of the season. He had turned into a big player for us and was a big, big loss.
We had several loans recalled when they had performed well for us, which meant that we had a few gaps.

14th position was a fair return on the season and we were in a good position to add a couple of players to the squad and aim for a top half finish.
However, we lost several key players over the summer and had to focus on a rebuild, rather than a tweak.

I saw that Wayne had a conversation on Facebook regarding people's concerns. I'm sure he'd be happy to discuss if people were to reach out in regards to last season / the summer / start of this season.

 

[Edge]

We finished last season with one win in 10 & a case could easily have been made to replace GoBo in the summer.

This summer we signed a team full of midfielders & two teenage forwards. One of those forwards went to Winsford on dual reg almost immediately. And a right-back we decided not to play.
We also seemed to play a lot of friendlies

And then DC has to strengthen but then loses key players to injuries & other clubs.

but despite this we’re not down yet. The Feb fixture list looks kind if we can show some fight

 

[MarkDavies89]

It was 2 wins in 8 that we finished with last season. The 9th result back was the 0-0 draw with Macclesfield. Still not great, but better than 1 in 10. We also ended the year with a 16 year old in goal. I thought Shae was great, but he was very inexperienced and there were some mistakes and communication errors from that - That's not a criticism, just it is what it is.

Last season was strange as we had two great periods of form and two poor periods of form.
If the season was more balanced and we ended up with the same amount of points, then I don't think there would have been such an appetite to remove the managers, especially with the results vs Macclesfield and Workington.

With the friendlies this season, we had a lot of trialists so needed to see how they'd get on in match situations. A lot of teams play a fair amount of friendlies in pre season.

I think with some of the players brought in pre / at the start of this season, it was decided that their attitudes weren't right / they turned out to not be good enough / too light weight.

We aren't down, but we absolutely have to have a change of fortune soon. There are definitely 3 winnable games in February, which would go a long way to hauling us out of the bottom two. As well as that, 5 of our next 7 games are at home - 4 of them that we should be winning / getting points from. The table does look bleak, but the picture could certainly change in the next month or so.

At the end of the day, we all want the same thing - 1874 playing in the Northern Premier West next season!