Tranmere 0 - 1 Referee (Stockport)

[Boz]

I can see us scoring on Saturday, but agree with Bigmart that we'll have problems keeping a clean sheet. Even more so with a rookie keeper. Brighton won tonight too. From the official site, it looks like we won't be ready to appoint a new manager until at least next week. Lets see if the extra time gives Les and Shaun more time to get their ideas across.

 

[SonkORLY?]

Sonkorly - bit surprised at your reaction to last night. I usually agree with most of your assessments, but I thought last night was a huge improvement on the last home game I saw, a chaotic embarrassment against Wallsall. That day the defence looked like it was caught in a bomb scare.

I'm not going to pretend that last night was great - it wasn't, although I thought County passed it about quite well, contrary to what you wrote. However, sometimes we have to remember that we are watching football in the third tier of English football. Even when it's good, it's not that good!

Still, we do have to beat teams like County to stay up - five of the next six fixtures come into the 'winnable' category. Care to predict how many points we'll pick up?

Well, none will likely prove more winnable than last night, and we picked up 0 points...

My most recent game prior to last night was our 1-1 draw at home to Colchester, and we were better that day than we were last night. Infact, in my last 3 games before that (vs Bolton, Dons and Gillingham) I think we played better than last night (and against better opposition). I missed us get battered by Leeds, Charlton etc...so maybe I've missed the worst bits...as I said, I thought the work-rate was there, for both teams, but the actual quality was really poor...

I've seen Stockport play a couple of times this season because I'm up that way sometimes. They're awful and prior to last night had only won 2 games all season. I thought they passed it around well compared to us but I firmly believe that, on the basis of last nights performance, both sides look like relegation material. Les saying he'd have settled for 0-0 worries me as these low standards, even if met, will without question see us relegated. We were disorganised but Stockport weren't really good enough to do much about it - a better team would probably have had a field day IMO. As fans we should expect a lot more and I just can't bring myself to say anything good about a 1-0 defeat at home to a team like Stockport...

 

[Boz]

I can see both sides of this debate. Colchester we got a point against a likely play-off contender which in context is good. However we only had a handful of efforts on goal and if the Us had come with their shooting boots, they'd have been out of sight. Stockport hardly had an effort on goal aside the penalty, whereas we had about a dozen, mostly on target and that hasn't happened much. The defence, Broomes' error aside were fairly solid. More worrying was that Stockport had 58% of the possession, a stronger opponent would certainly make better use of that . As highlighted above, it is the midfield which was the main let-down Monday night. Hopefully Les will look at making some changes there.

 

[Ian]

There's a good nine minute highlight reel on Player and whilst Stockport had a lot of chances, most of them were from long range. Our chances were more clear cut and Curran missed some great opportunities.

I was also completely wrong in regard to the goal. It's hard to see but i don't think it was offside as the defence messed up and it was definitely a penalty too! Daniels clearly brought the fella down. Who'd be a ref eh!