City Rue Missed Chances – Shrewsbury 2-0 Imps

City started their month of December with a trip to Shropshire and Shrewsbury Town, but the result wasn’t an early Christmas present for the fans with a 2-0 defeat.

Mark Kennedy made no changes to the side that beat Morecambe over a week ago in the league. We stayed with the 3 at the back system, with TJ Eyoma as the right sided centre-half and Regan Poole as the wing-back. Max Sanders and Matty Virtue continued their partnership in midfield, with Charles Vernam keeping his place. The starting eleven was quality but is when you looked beyond that you had the issues. Our attacking options from the bench were Tom Hopper and Freddie Draper. The former is a striker, that isn’t a goalscorer but more of a creator and the other one is still only eighteen-years-old.

We are missing Ted Bishop, Danny Mandroiu and Jordon Garrick. For some who cannot remember, Ted had five goals and two assists in the month of August making him our second joint goalscorer. Danny was on an extremely impressive run of form pre-injury having scored in three consecutive games. While Jordon was on a poor patch of form, his pace is a useful asset off the bench in the last twenty/twenty-five minutes of a game. It isn’t an excuse, but we are lacking in that area of the pitch, and I felt for Mark yesterday, because he had no pace to stretch tired defenders from his bench.

I have seen some people saying that we were terrible yesterday and I really don’t see it like that at all. We controlled the first half an hour and we should have been home and hosed by half-time. Shrewsbury were struggling to contain the high counter press of our attack. On top of that, the home side were struggling to get out and were just punting long balls forward with no purpose. We had multiple chances, Ben House stole the ball from the goalkeeper, but the striker took too long and allowed the goalkeeper to recover and make the save. Vernam went close with a long-range free kick, which was pushed away from the top corner, while Virtue volleyed his effort just wide of the mark.

It is no secret that the first goal would be crucial, and we handed them it. Jamie Robson jumped up for a header with his hand up in the air. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, because it does look like a push, and I don’t think a professional footballer would do that intentionally. It is one of those errors that will probably never happen again in his career. Jamie has been in a good patch of form and hopefully this doesn’t affect him going forward. Obviously, the referee had no choice and awarded the penalty, which was converted. City went into the break a goal down, when we really should have been two up.

We didn’t manage to start the second half as well as we would have liked and a second goal from Shrewsbury completely killed the game. A lazy piece of play from Walsh saw the home side break forward and we couldn’t deal with a ball across the face of goal and that was it game over.

There were positives for City though, we looked very good in the first half. We seem to have turned a corner since Chippenham with creating chances, and while some people will complain about putting them away, you have to create them first to do that so we will get goals soon. If we played that game ten times with the same periods of dominance, we probably would have been at least two goals up at least seven times out of that ten, obviously the disappointment was the goals we conceded but with our defensive record recently, it doesn’t look like something that will become regular.

Another positive would be, again, the performance of our midfield maestro Sanders. Max is a completely different player to what we saw last season. I can’t even remember how many times last season I would speak about Max and how I think he should be starting every week and I wasn’t the only one with those opinions. Yet again he was the best player on the pitch, and I really start to wonder what Michael Appleton didn’t see in him. His all-round game has evolved with regular football too and with Virtue next to him, he really has that licence to drive forward and make things happen.

Football is a funny old game, and if we had come away with a win with the exact same performance yesterday some will have been very happy. I’m not saying you should be happy with yesterday, but at least be optimistic, we have a young manager that is building a project with a young group of players, what is there not be excited about?