In the same week that Donald Trump talked about grabbing women by the pussy, I heard someone using the word ‘awfulising’. If this isn’t the end of days, I don’t know what is.
Awfulising, apparently, is where you have a minor anxiety and your mind runs amok creating an entirely imaginary world of disaster.
There’s a bloke near me who habitually groans ‘oh, here we go’ every time the opposition go over the half way line. Plus, of course, there’s the common knee jerk reaction that fans have when one poor touch or pass turns a player into a lazy, hopeless waste of space.
It’s natural to awfulise in football; you only want one outcome and by-and-large that isn’t confirmed until the final whistle. But, sometimes it’s worth taking a step back; Michael Appleton’s selection against Wimbledon seemed to be based on taking an early initiative. Alex MacDonald is an impact player, he’ll never give up, but he struggles to maintain his all action game for 90 minutes. So, you have to decide at which end of the game you want him to have maximum impact, Kyle Hemming is similar. With both starting everything pointed towards going for an early knock-out.
What Michael Appleton didn’t seem to account for is that, after a ropey start to the season, Wimbledon seemed to have dusted off an old playbook from the 80s; they’ve gone physical.
New-Wimbledon are cast as a metrosexual hipster club; the romantics’ favourites. Culturally they’re the complete opposite of the Crazy Gang. So, it’s easy to think of them as a soft touch, and that’s what caught us out.
Chey Dunkley will not have a tougher afternoon all year; he’s usually a match for anyone in a physical contest, and apart from the goal he seemed to contain Elliot pretty well. But once Elliot had gone, he then had to deal with Tyrone Barnett.
It came as a bit of a shock to the referee who seemed to struggle to distinguish between physical but fair and physical and unfair. Early on, he was happy to book players for physical challenges, then having made a rod for his own back, he had to let rough challenges go just to keep things credible.
By the time it started to count, he was lost. It’s rare that a game pivots on a single decision. Generally, I think referees have much less influence over a game than managers would sometimes have you believe. But Dean Parrett’s sliding challenge on Wes Thomas just before the second goal defined the game.
So, let’s get to it; in the ground it looked a certain foul, but the ground level camera showing the referee’s view made it look like he got the ball. However, he was clearly overstretching and you can argue he was out of control by the time he put his challenge in. The camera from behind confirmed it, showing him off the ground and therefore out of control.
But then, so was John Lundstram in the challenge that got him sent off against Stevenage and banned for Wembley last year. We certainly didn’t think the Lundstram deserved his red, and as a principle, I don’t agree with trial by multiple TV angles in football. Therefore, my view is that it was probably a foul, but I can see why the referee allowed it to stand.
In addition to the goal that resulted, we were shell shocked, which was the root cause of conceding the third. And after that, it was all over. Had it been a foul, the outcome of the game would have been different.
So, ultimately we were tactically outmanoeuvred; we came to take charge and exploit Wimbledon’s supposed soft belly. In the end we were caught out and didn’t react properly. We will, I hope, learn from the experience; next time, rather than awfulising at a setback, maybe we need to grab the game by the pussy.
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