TALKING POINTS

Matty Orton- @MattyOrton1

Matty discusses the thrashing at Wrexham

PERFORMANCE OR RESULT?

9000 Welshman and a League One team in disguise doesn’t mix well when it comes up against a young and inexperienced group of players. Dragon vs Seagull equals burnt Seagull.

However, and such is the dynamic of football to throw up such a bizarre scenario, the Wrexham fans who I spoke to were mainly complimentary of our performance.

I understand completely, that if you come away from a game having lost 6-0 and say that the losing team played adequately then you sound like an idiot watching the wrong sport. I confused myself last night trying to work it out during the wounded (not literally, which may surprise some) walk back to the car. Why were Wrexham fans complimenting our team after we’ve just shipped SIX?

Performance vs Result. Wind back to The Shay on that sweltering afternoon where Mark Halstead put in ‘that’ performance. There were no complimentary Halifax fans that day (I know they’d lost) but we were shocking. We didn’t perform, we offered nothing (story of the season so far, I know) but won a game ugly. No performance. Fast forward to Wrexham yesterday and it felt less anti-football, like we wanted to play, we were trying to find the combinations, the one-two’s, the triangles, the overlap. Everything we hadn’t seen against Halifax.

So should we have made it difficult for them as oppose to try and go toe to toe? Do what Southend did last weekend perhaps and keep a clean sheet?

Very difficult against a team who have scored 29 goals in 10 games having already put two other sides to the sword 5-0, so why not give it a go?

We looked bright early on and definitely didn’t look bottom of the table quality, but, when do results start becoming more important than performances? And when does a bad start become a bad season?

THE (NOT AS IMPORTANT AS THE 11TH AND 12TH) 10TH GAME

Johnson may have coined it but I’m not really sure where this 10^th game idea came from. However, it now seems to be commonplace to use it as the measuring stick to assess where a season is going. Wrexham wasn’t a particularly nice tenth game, and a generous assessment would be ‘not very good’.

Although it appears to be worse than that, the general and more accurate assessment would be ‘F#cked’. For the first time in a long time, we sit dead in the water propping up a table of 23 other teams.

So the 10^th game becomes more about the 11^th, which is generally the way fixtures work, but in terms of getting a real grasp on things, a measure of how we are going to get out of the shite we are in, then the next two are crucial.

Scunthorpe arrive on Saturday in what could be a defining game for not only the season but a whole era for Torquay United. For those traumatised by yesterday’s 6-0, some will recall the 8-1 defeat to Scunthorpe at Plainmoor way back in 1995.

Results like that live long in the memory and in some cases do define eras of the time. The 7-3 home defeat to Bromley would be another one of those, where ‘granny kicker’ Edwards took charge. Flashbacks to a time of buying cheap bulk pasta and kicking pensioners is never really something we thought we’d think about again, but here we are, and here it is, coming back to haunt us.

Such is the life of a TUFC supporter, we’ve had it alright for a while now, perhaps allowed complacency and stagnation to kick in whilst becoming used to the good recent times. Old wounds being opened up and a reminder that supporting a club at this level isn’t supposed to be easy. There’s a bit more to it than that. The fact that Scunthorpe and Maidenhead are already being dubbed ‘season definers’ is just the next part of that definitive rollercoaster.

IN OR OUT

In or out is the recurring theme. But it’s not quite that simple. Currently there appears to be three separate factions. Those who will back the manager to the grave – no matter what, those who want to see the end of him today (by end and grave I mean tenure, although there is some hate flying about) and those who would give him more time to get things right.

There were a couple of silly boys yesterday, both were at least in their 60’s, one wanted Johnson IN – the other OUT . In a long story short, they both disagreed with each other and ended up explaining to the stewards why they were almost fighting like naughty school kids.

It really was a pathetic scene to witness, but nonetheless shows the figurative opinions that are currently dividing the fanbase.

The current situation will have not gone unnoticed by the powers in charge and believe me when I say they’ll be managers who’ll have noticed and will have an up to date CV ready to go at the click of a button. We are bottom of the league and the pressure is on.

SCOTT SMITH

New loan signing Scott Smith joined yesterday and was given the number 36 for the pleasure. It wasn’t until the end when I made the connection that it was his family who had watched the game sat in front of me. Please accept my apologies on behalf of the majority of the fanbase and those at TUFC. I dread to think what they and Scott must be thinking they’ve got themselves involved in after witnessing that. Nonetheless, I thought he played well despite the circumstance, if we can get the midfield in some sort of working order then I can’t see why results won’t start happening for us.