Men's 3rd XI: Arse!

The title gives you Dan’s customarily succinct view on Saturday’s result, and as I wasn’t there I cannot really comment. What I can do however is rectify an omission from the previous Saturday, where I somehow neglected to mention that – please sit down at this point – Matt Voutt was spotted in the D at Kettering. Yes indeed ladies and gentlemen, right up there with Rob Furlong crossing the halfway line during open play, Matty made what is strongly believed to be his first appearance in an opposition D in a Nomads shirt. Quite how I missed that out of the Kettering match report I do not know.

So how did this momentous event come about? Well, I was wondering, but a lengthy conversation with Matt in The Brook after the 2’s game on Saturday provided the answer. Matt was expounding on the 4-3-3 formation and how much he prefers it to our 4-4-2. Instinctively, having played a lot of 1-3-3-3 in my youth, I would agree with him, but I am firmly of the opinion that, for whatever reason, 4-4-2 just works better for us and I don’t see us changing to 4-3-3 any time soon.

You see, much as I hate to be the grumpy old git who sits in the corner, arms folded, shaking his head and saying “ooooh, something different, well, we tried that once and it didn’t work”, that is very much how I feel about 4-3-3. Some of us may remember a visit to Bourne Deeping for a friendly a few years back where we did indeed try 4-3-3 in the second half. After all, if you cannot try something in a friendly then what is the point of them? Anyway, at half-time we were completely dominant, 2 or 3 up in a game we would go on to win 5-1 if I recall correctly. Changing to 4-3-3 at half-time however was like flicking a switch. We instantly conceded control of the midfield to the opposition, and were suddenly really struggling against a team somewhat weaker than ourselves. So, having fulfilled my desire to try it out, 4-3-3 and its close cousin 1-3-3-3 were confined to the bin for ever so far as Nomads 3rd XI were concerned.

Aha, said Matty, but what you have to remember is that in 4-3-3 your wing backs are key. You haven’t a hope in hell of covering the full width of the pitch with only 3 midfielders, so what you do is your midfield plays narrower, making sure that the opposition cannot come through the middle while accepting that they may get down the flanks in midfield, but that is OK because your wing backs step up to block that, with two centre-backs behind them as cover. Do that and you compensate for your lack of midfield numbers, and can reap the benefits of the extra man up front.

This was one of those moments in your life of absolute clarity, when suddenly a whole lot of disparate half-formed thoughts suddenly make total sense. Of course, when I was playing on the left of a midfield three in my youth, I didn’t play very wide at all. That was the job of the left back behind me and the left winger in front of me. My role was more of a classic inside-left. Of course I wasn’t going to cover the entire left half of the field. Furthermore, this is precisely why 4-3-3 doesn’t work for us now. With all due respect to our estimable regular wing backs, they have a combined age of 125 and expecting them to suddenly become the engine room of the side so that we can push an extra man up front may not prove to be a one-way route to total success.

And most importantly, the reason for our all out attack mode of recent weeks is laid so clearly bare that even I can now see it: no-one actually listens to the skipper’s team talks. Yes, that’s it! I can witter on all I like about formations and tactics and how I want us to play, but all the time everyone else is simply working out what they think we should be doing, and then going out and playing as though that is what we are doing, regardless of what anyone else thinks or is doing themselves. It now all makes total sense!

And to come back to this particular case, Matty had clearly decided that we really ought to be playing 4-3-3 and so was quite logically piling forward to plug the gap which his left midfielder had not left vacant because he was playing a 4-4-2, or whatever formation he had decided instead that we should be playing. And hence Matty arrives in the D, latches on to a loose ball and produces a finish entirely commensurate with a man who has not been that high up the pitch for several years. And so the great mystery of the flying win-back at Kettering can be put to bed at last.

As for the St Ives game, another 2-2 which could and this time maybe should have been a victory. All of the update I have is from Dan so you may want to divide everything by an appropriate factor, but the gist of it is that we played well again, dominated the game, and were cruising at 2-0. Leo had produced a screamer of a finish into the top corner, an excellent way to open his Nomads account, and Garth had added a second in a manner which must have been a lot less impressive because Dan couldn’t remember how it ended up in the net, sorry Garth. Unfortunately we switched off for 10 minutes late in the game, lost our shape for no apparent reason and conceded 2 goals to end up with only a share of the spoils. Or, as Dan would have it, “Arse!”

But a great many positives to come out of the day, not least that we had much the better of a game against a side who are challenging at the top of the table, and we were disappointed to come away with only a draw from a fixture which we lost 7-1 last season. So, well done to everyone, and a real confidence boost to take into the visit of the league leaders on Saturday. Sadly I won’t be around again to provide any tactical advice for everyone to ignore, but everyone doing their own thing seems to be working just fine for now.