Five things we learned from 2017/18

3: League Two wasn’t better than we imagined

Possibly we all fell foul of fawning a little over the quality in the division after a tough start, but by Christmas I’d argue that we showed League Two wasn’t ‘all that’. After the draw with Morecambe a few journalists and the likes of myself claimed maybe it was harder than we thought but by May, there we were in the top seven.

The teams at the bottom were better than those at the bottom of the National League, granted, and the lack of part time teams meant rarely did our fitness yield us major gains in the final stages of matches, but all those sides we faced had issues, weaknesses and nobody was signficantly better than us. I maintain the best side we saw were either Coventry at our place or Luton away, both teams that had spent relatively big on a striker or two. Outside of that, did anyone really stand out? Did we really feel the competition was any tougher than Boreham Wood away or Eastleigh at home? I wasn’t on the pitch so maybe I’m out of order, but I think the final outcome shows we were maybe just slow out of the blocks, rather than the standard being that much better than we anticipated. After all, do you really think Danny Cowley under estimated anyone?

2: Three strikers is not enough

Whenever I think of our striker situation I cannot help but see the words ‘the Fourth Man’, which for me defined our season. As early as pre-season Danny was looking for that fourth striker, Ade Azeez wasn’t far from  signing before a ball had been kicked, but all season it eluded us. Ollie Hawkins and Simeon Akinola were two we lost in August, in January it was allegedly Karlan Ahearne-Grant as well as names such as Alex Revell and Shay McCarten. Danny knows he needed another option but he refused to compromise on value for money or quality. As it turns out, we did okay with three, but put simply, it can’t be the same next year.

Matt Green’s drought in the autumn cost him a 20+ goal haul which he would have fully deserved. You’ll not hear me calling Green, he is by far the best striker we have at the club, an all rounder with attributes in the channels, on the flank and out wide. He might not be a ‘natural goalscorer’ to most due to some of his misses, but he got into positions to score on numerous occasions. Matt Rhead is a great footballer but is labelled for his size and maybe hits the deck too often. Is he targeted and the victim, or is he the aggressor looking to con referees? It is a bit of both and at times it worked for us, at times it did not. Ollie Palmer is unconventional, a wild card that is best played towards the end of a game when even we don’t know what is needed to win it. All three have useful elements to their game, but three is simply not enough for a side such as ours. How many did we have last season? Marriott, Rhead, Margetts, Bonne, Robinson, Southwell, Muldoon and that’s just off the top of my head. That’s almost three times as many and I’m sure if I really thought about it I could come up with one more (Alex Simmons).

We simply cannot afford to go into next season with three, but Danny has already acknowledged that. I don’t think we need to be throwing £150k at a Dennis, or £100k at a Hemmings because I firmly believe that we can turn a player who doesn’t appear to be prolific on paper into a good centre forward. The driving force behind our success this season was the ability to get more out of players than they were really capable of. Ollie Palmer and Elliott Whitehouse are two prime examples, both struggled early doors but you could see Danny squeezing every last drop out of them. At times he did the same with Matt Green, playing him here, there and everywhere. I don’t need to see ’20’ in last season’s ‘goals for’ column of a new signing, I just need to know that Danny believes he’s the right man for the job. Aside from the loan deals I don’t think he’s made a bad move in the permanent market and perhaps that reticence is the reason. However, this season it must be put right.

1: It was a great return to the Football League

So we never found a tactic to settle on, the loan players let us down, we struggled with only three forward players and et we still won a Wembley final and got to the play-offs too. It is easy to look at things that weren’t quite right, but what about the things that were? What about the attitude shown by almost all of our squad, whenever they were dropped? Luke Waterfall perhaps epitomised that more than any, lost his place twice and yet still ended up holding a trophy aloft at Wembley. Tactically we never settled, but we outfought Coventry who were eventually promoted and did the same to Exeter at our place. Our cup run pitted us against a virtually full strength Peterborough as well as the cream of the Premier League’s kids and we still came up smelling of roses.

We attracted some really good players to the club, some of whom we’ve not seen the best of. James Wilson and Tom Pett will both be great for the first team, Freck’s return hasn’t perhaps been as dominating as some hoped but he’s still scored goals and settled well. Michael Bostwick came here, maybe because of location but he signed a new deal because of the set up. There’s a training ground coming, that means even better players and even more time with the players for our excellent staff.

It is easy to get caught up in what didn’t go right and even now, people are worrying on social media. Players leaving causes concern, the training ground progress, in fact anything there is to moan about, someone will. The fact is that we’re moving forward as a club, becoming more professional by the day and that will be reflected not only in the personnel we attract but also the way we conduct our business. The Football League has changed since we were last in it and this season we’ve had to adapt quickly. Next time out were a year older, a year wiser and a year further on. The club I see before me today is virtually unrecognisable from the one that won the National League. Some ask if that is a good thing, if the commercial element is us losing sight of our ethos, but I argue against that. If we’re going to progress we have to become smarter with the incoming, be it sponsorship, seating or prawn sandwich bars. If we want to compete with everyone in the division then we need the new training ground, bricks and mortar buildings and facilities to match.

Nobody is forgetting who we are or where we’ve come from, but we’re progressing and even if we don’t sign a player tomorrow or Wednesday, it doesn’t mean we’re losing ground. I’ve picked three fundamental issues I feel held us back last season and it was still a record breaker, the second successive season we’ve lifted silverware and our first trip to Wembley. We were new to the league, a little naïve to the quality early doors and we still finished seventh. Some fans got delusions of grandeur when we went third at Christmas, but when all is said and done, this was another great season. Imagine if everything suddenly clicks next season, we could be in real danger of lifting a third trophy in as many years. Now, that would be something worth writing a book about.