Matty Craig

A pointless signing in a window of randomness.

Best of luck to him. There might be a player, I don’t know because when he was in the team, we were often set up as a paralysed sloth like shambles. He may have been in part responsible, or hindered as a result. I’m not sure which.

 

There’s a big difference between showing passion and being a petulant child.

He’s gone. He won’t be missed.

Wish him no ill.

 

After the rave reviews Craig got when he was at Doncaster, his signing looked a bit of a coup, and I thought he looked impressive initially. I'm not sure about the chronology re him and Nwakali. Whom did we sign first? Even if it was Nwakali, none of us knew what a fabulous player we had in him. We did know Benson's very unfortunate injury record, so I wouldn't say that it was clear Craig would be surplus to requirements. It's just unfortunate for him that it turns out we have three experienced and very talented midfielders at our current level. I wouldn't be surprised if Craig does very well with Mansfield.

 

A signing which made no sense at the time. Not his fault, just made an unbalanced squad even more unbalanced.

Wish him well in his future.

 

I'm not sure that it didn't make any sense - Nwakali didn't sign for another couple of weeks and was still two months away from fitness, Benson is never fit, and Hourihane clearly wasn't going to be a regular. That leaves us with Connell, Phillips and Russell - and Russell hasn't done particularly well until this season. Perhaps if you believed Hourihane would be a regular starter I could see why it wouldn't make sense.

 

Way I see it, we favour the high press. His tackling style didn't enable that, very rash sometimes in going in.

 

actually spoke to him prior to the Wrexham game and he was really articulate and admitted frustration got the better of him after getting subbed off via Leyton orient and to be honest put myself in his shoes too I would have more than likely been the same. Seemed a really likeable person and I wish him all the best in his future career.

 

Well his signing was a bit random but apart from that not too bad of a window did and nwalki plus Marc Roberts and I think gent has good potential.

 

Exactly my thoughts too. Think fans took their own frustrations out over the result on him.

 

Wasn;t there some concern about the wellness of Connell at the time.?

 

No

 

Couldn’t give a monkeys about his reaction at getting subbed. I actually quite liked it, showed he cared.

He seemed an ok player to me but can’t see him forging a career above league one as he won’t contribute enough goals or assists. Modern day sideways midfielder

 

Agree with your first point, disagree with second though, mate. Connell has only got 2 goals, 1 last season iirc in the league. His ball retention is brilliant for this level, I honestly believe he will have a solid championship career eventually

 

It was a poor to average window overall. Costly, wasteful and made an unbalanced squad even more unbalanced while failing to get the positions we explicitly stated, and failing to loan out players we explicitly said we wanted to get minutes.

 

I think that's a tad harsh mate. If Luca picked up his illness again, or if we had bids for him or Phillips, Craig would have got plenty of game time. Nwakali may have had a tonne of offers and we decided to take on Craig weeks previous to make sure we at least had cover. I dont think any were bad signings. Even hourihane is doing extremely well with our attacking set pieces. Would have liked one more striker in but may not have been possible with our expenditure on DKD and wages with Humphrys without getting rid of Cosgrove first. Dkd, humps, cosgrave, watters, jalo, Marsh. Lots of options. Not good enough some of them but if clubs aren't interested we have to compromise

 

I think 4 wins are giving a skew on perception and that its a very poor division low on quality despite perceived big teams.

Personally, I think the Hourihane thing was really disappointing. We have/had something like 10 midfielders, 1 actual striker, 3 right wing backs and one left wing back who wasn't trusted for ages and the way we botched goalkeeper recruitment was shocking. We sent multiple centre halves out on loan and still play one of the biggest liabilities I've seen.

We've had multiple truly shocking performances and not one I'd put close to the performances we might have expected under Stendel.

Inspite of all that, we're somehow in the playoffs. But that doesn't mean it was anything like a good window. In fact typing that out, I think I'm being generous to tag average to its descriptor.

It's all just opinions though at the end of the day.

 

There’s lots of factors as to why the first half of this season has been so disjointed in terms of results and performances, recruitment is certainly one of them.

Form/fitness is another, we are only just at a point in the last few weeks where nearly all main players are fit and up to speed. Roberts was hopeless the first few weeks, probably due to not playing much last season, now he’s up to speed he’s been fantastic, we will see how much the injury has set him back. Nwakali the obvious other, Humphries looked like me out there the first couple of weeks, Watters is still coming back. There’s at least 4-5 others. A couple you can carry, but not as many as we had.

I also think fitness in general was bad for the first third of the season, but seems to have got better. I’m not sure what caused it to be so bad tbh, a little disappointing from a professional club. The amount of games we finish on the back foot in the last 10 minutes is worrying.

New signings/new manager, these all take time to bed in. Another new defence and GK, DKD and Phillips, our main attacking threats getting to know each others games. You can see in the last couple of weeks that these two have started to get a better understanding.

We definitely need a bit more quality, but there were a number of fundamentals that were under par and needed to be addressed. I think this was down to (again) changing manager and signings either coming in injured or not fit.

I’d like to see another physical, ball carrying CM. Not necessarily a starter, but someone we can bring on in the last 20 to give us more of a presence in midfield. We’ve needed this for years. A striker, two would be nice. And for the love of god, someone with genuine pace anywhere across the attacking third would be great.

As for Craig, we don’t know that if he had started instead of Connell this season that we would be any worse off. Luka hasn’t been that great, so it’s certainly possible that we would have fared better with Craig.

 

A bit of frustration is no bad thing imho, shows he cares. Us oldies all remember big Trev chucking his shirt at Clarkey Mk.1

 

That's your opinion mines different

Craig was a odd signing ill give you that
Gaga looked a good signing on paper just didn't work out.
Roberts very good signing after a poor start shame it wasn't a season ago
Dkd very good signing
Gent loads of potential will be good.
Nwkali again great find

I'd have liked to have seen us off load jalo tk league 2 and get him some minutes. But not sure how it can be such a bad window we lost 5 1st team regulars in the summer including the top scorer 2 seasons running and find ourselves 5th at the half way point. Can't have been such a bad window.

 

As I've outlined previously, our league position is no indicator of how good or entertaining we are necessarily. It's possible to be a poor team and still get promoted, just as its possible to be a very good team and not get promoted. It's all relative to the quality if our peers.

We've had sporadic pockets of ok football, but in terms of entertainment to date, it's commonly been a difficult watch. Which might suggest why so many seats have been empty despite having been paid for.