Mixed Emotions: Northampton 2-2 Imps

City picked up a point on the road last night against Northampton Town, but it could have been all three with the hosts picking up an equaliser late on.

Last night was a perfect advert for why people watch football. We had free flowing attacking football from both sides, great defensive work from City and controversial decisions. Unfortunately for us, we came out the wrong side of those controversial decisions and a minor referee call late on involving a throw-in cost us all three points, and that is probably why many people, including myself, were very angry following the full-time whistle.

Northampton deserved the point, I’m not disputing that, and if we were the team equalising late on I’d have said we would have deserved to win the game. Northampton had enough chances to win the game and take away all three points, so for me the bigger picture has to be that we weren’t at our best yet we got a point away from home. That’s surely a positive thing. When the final whistle went, emotions were up in the air, but looking back on it now, I’m happy with the point and they only negative will have to be the lead we held and not seeing that out.

There was a singular change made by Mark Kennedy following our big win against Wycombe and that was Jack Burroughs coming in to replace Lasse Sorensen, who made the bench despite the injury that he picked up on Saturday. Adam Jackson returned to the fold too, which is great to see. Jacko is a key part to our squad, keeping him fit and getting him a run of games is going to be extremely important over this next few weeks, as the games keep coming thick and fast.

Northampton started well and that’s led to me to notice something quite worrying from the first few games. We seem to be letting the opposition get some confidence early on, and we don’t seem to be starting well. These following lines are all taken out of my match reviews from the past few weeks:

Bolton: “Almost all the hopes of getting the season to the best start possible went within the first few minutes. We couldn’t get a touch on the ball and Bolton were passing the ball around with some real conviction.”

Wycombe: “The first twenty minutes or so weren’t the easiest ride for City. With the wind against us in the opening half, Wycombe looked to go direct and hurt us that way.”

We’ve started on the back foot in all three league games now, and I seem to recall Notts County also having lots of the ball in the opening five or ten minutes in the cup too. It is a bit of a worry, but fortunately apart from Bolton, it hasn’t really cost us yet. It’s definitely something we need to look at, and to have a good chance on Saturday against Shrewsbury, we’ve got to make a conscious effort to stamp that out of our game and come flying out the blocks.

Jon Brady is a good manager, and I think he outplayed Mark for large periods of the game. For the first fifteen minutes, Northampton were finding gaps between our back-line and the midfield of Ethan Erhahon and Ethan Hamilton, so that was really causing us problems. We managed to cotton onto that, and there was a period where we looked really dangerous, with Danny Mandroiu and Reeco Hackett cutting inside allowing Jaden Brown and Burroughs to exploit the space on the outside.

The period where we looked at our most dangerous is when we took the lead. Reeco will get the plaudits for the finish, but the build-up play was just as impressive in my opinion. Danny dropped deep to pick up the ball in the middle of the park before releasing Erhahon into the area that he’d normally be in himself with a smart pass. Erhahon drove forward before placing a good ball into Reeco, who blasted it into the top right corner with the outside of his boot from the edge of the area.

It wasn’t an undeserved lead for City, but if I was a Northampton fan, I’d feel that my team didn’t deserve to be a goal down after only a few half chances for both sides. Our goal helped settle things down, and it knocked some confidence out of the hosts, which is understandable considering they lost their 2 previous league games by really small margins. Ben House had 2 good chances in the first half, which perhaps could have seen us 2 up into the break. The first one saw him played through on goal, but he could only fire into the side netting on his weaker foot. The second involved Burroughs, the on-loan Coventry man got to the byline before pulling it back to Ben, but the latter couldn’t get good enough contact on the strike and it was an easy save for Max Thompson in the Northampton net.

Mark made an unusual switch at the break, which is something I haven’t seen from him too many times since he arrived last summer. The head coach put us in a 4-4-2 formation, with Tyler Walker replacing Brown and it just didn’t work at all.

The first half was equal between the two sides, Northampton probably didn’t deserve to losing but they would have been fairly happy with how they were shaping up against a good side. The start of the second half was a completely different story, we looked extremely unorganised and gaps were showing all over the pitch. Just a few minutes after the players came back onto the pitch for the second period, the score should have been level. Lukas Jensen pulled off an unreal save, before the ball dropped kindly for the hosts, leading to another chance, which was cleared off the line by Paudie O’Connor, and then a third smashed away by Burroughs, which was also on the line, all before a Northampton attacker fired over the bar.

I’d seen enough of the 4-4-2 and so had Mark, as he reverted back to the 3-4-3 bringing on Lasse for Danny. In my opinion, although he reverted back to the correct system, that was the wrong change. It should have been House that came off, he was having a poor game for me, and I just think bringing him off and keeping Danny and Reeco on together would have helped Tyler get into the game a bit more. However, Mark is the head coach, I’m just a fan so I trust his judgement, but I can’t help but feel keeping Ben on wasn’t the right choice.

The change of system calmed us down a little bit, and although the majority of the action was us defending, we got up the pitch and went 2-0 up against the run of play. Sean Roughan, who I thought had a brilliant game, found Lasse on the right and the latter delivered in a great ball towards Paudie, who just did what he normally does defensively and got his head on it but this time fired it towards the net. The goal relaxed me, and at that point, most of us were thinking we’d go on to win the game from here and take an undeserved three points back to Lincolnshire.

Northampton initially struggled following the goal, with a Sam Hoskins dive telling you everything you needed to know about their attitude going into the final ten minutes (plus the *six* of added time) of the game. With the game poised at 2-0, the last thing we needed was to give up an easy goal, and we did exactly that. TJ Eyoma, who had a fairly good game up until this point, failed to clear the ball with much conviction and his header was poor. It fell straight to Louis Appere, who had all the time in the world to fire the ball into the top right corner.

That goal changed the game, the home side were fired up and City had a massive challenge on their hands to secure all three points. The board went up for six minutes of added time as we replaced TJ with Jacko from the bench. We did everything right in additional time and we should have got to the final whistle with all three points. Walker threw himself into a tackle, that got our living room cheering, and cleared the ball all the way out for a throw-in at the half-way line, and that had to be it.

Play continued on though, and this is where the controversial moment comes in. The ball goes out at the half-way line, but the Northampton player opts to take the throw 20 yards further forward towards the goal. They win the corner from a throw that was too far forward and they score an equalising goal. The timing element doesn’t bother me too much, although I’d love to know where they extra time on the initial six was picked up from, but allowing a player to take 20 yards for a throw-in is unforgivable. It completely changes that phase of play that followed, and on the face of it, it cost us a win.

It was frustrating because of the lead we had, but we didn’t deserve to be in that position and Northampton deserved their point and probably all three if I’m honest. There’s obviously an argument for game management and ‘you can’t lose a two goal lead’ but with the new rule changes, managing a game is so much more difficult and basically impossible. I say this with confidence, last season we would have won that game, but naturally we will benefit from these changes at points over the season, so it’s just swings and roundabouts. Let’s take it on the chin, take the point we probably didn’t deserve and go again on Saturday afternoon.

There were lessons to be learnt last night, both for Mark and the players, but there was were some positives to take too. Let’s be happy with the point and go into Shrewsbury at the weekend looking to get all three pints.

AllLincoln MOTM: Reeco Hackett