Northampton Town: Cobblers boss sees encouraging signs despite a late Southend goal rush at Sixfields
Cobblers V Southend United, football action. Cobblers celebrating Berahino's goal.
AIDY BOOTHROYD believes this latest defeat for the Cobblers will be judged as a watershed moment in the story of the current campaign.
Town’s miniature resurgence was stopped in its tracks by a Southend-shaped freight train that flattened the home side in the final stages and now has its controls set for the league two title.
Northampton’s name, meanwhile, returns to the bottom of the pile in the Football League, where an ever-worsening goal difference threatens to keep it for rather longer than can be considered comfortable.
But as good as Southend were in spells of this game and in particular in its final goal-laced nine minutes, the home side matched them.
They scored two goals – one a beautifully ugly John Johnson stab after Ben Tozer’s long throw had created mayhem in the box and one a classy finish from Saido Berahino who looked at least a yard offside when he collected Ben Harding’s through-ball.
Town almost added to their tally with a Michael Jacobs piledriver of a free-kick that Glenn Morris tipped wide, and a curling one from Harding that Morris didn’t even see as it struck the inside of his left-hand post and bounced agonisingly away from danger.
Credit to Southend. They were excellent at times and in Bilel Mohsni possess a player as technically gifted as any in the division.
It spoke volumes for their strength in depth that he did not even start the game.
Attacking with pace and in numbers, they created problems all afternoon in a cracking match that started slowly but soon bubbled up nicely into an edge-of-the-seat contest.
Some old problems came back to haunt Town, namely a hesitancy over taking responsibility for crosses into the danger zone, and the more modern phenomenon of running out of steam in the final stages of games.
Add the name of Southend to the list containing Swindon and Burton Albion of teams who have secured the points on visits to Sixfields with late flurries, something Boothroyd feels the team need to work on as a matter of urgency.
“I think we might look back and reflect on this in months to come and say it was a test for us,” said the Cobblers boss. “It’s not about playing for 45 or 50 or 60 minutes, it’s about playing for 95 minutes and we didn’t do that in this game.
“We can’t say we stayed in the game for 95 minutes. We can say we stayed in it for 85 minutes but unfortunately we’re not playing rugby union, we’re playing football.
“We’ve got to take that, not make excuses and make sure that we come back and prepare for another big game against Barnet next week.”
That game now assumes enormous importance, even though it is only January. The corner may not quite have been fully turned in terms of on-field performances but as far as the number of games played, the team is now very much on the ‘back nine’ to borrow from golfing parlance.
Just 20 games now remain for the Cobblers to get a firm grip on their situation and stave off the threat of non-League football.
Shipping five goals at home is not particularly impressive by anyone’s standards, but there have been signs in the matches prior to this that things are improving, and Boothroyd believes signs that the curve is going upwards were present in Saturday’s game.
“For long periods I don’t think you’d be able to tell who was the team at the top of the league and who was the team at the bottom,” he said.
“But they bring a player on who scores two goals for them. We didn’t switch on in the latter stages of the game and we got done on a quick throw-in and a corner.
“You can’t do that and we need to look at ourselves. We hit the post, we hit the bar and their goalkeeper has made a great save.
“At the end of it we’ve got done but it wasn’t a 5-2 match and we never gave up, we kept getting back up and giving it another go.
“We kept going and that was pleasing because we’re going to need lots more of that this season.”
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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Comments
There are 3 comments to this article
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bobby boy
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 07:58 PMspot on Franklyfrank , I still think we still need a old hand with a cool head at centrehalf and a centre forward to score more goals, we make a lot of chances and don't score enough goals.
manicred
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 06:34 PMI'm with FranklyFrank - an experienced keeper should be a massive priority. It is simply asking too much of Freddy Hall who has only played 2 games at this level. It is not fair on him or us, the supporters, and having a complete rookie behind the back four will not help them either. As daft as it may seem I was quite impressed with the way we played for the majority of the game but we cannot keep throwing the game away in the final 10 minutes. I'm afraid to say that unless we can engineer a win against Barnet (who always seem to get decent results at Sixfields) then I fear the worst.
FranklyFrank
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 04:28 PMYeah but have we signed a goalie yet?
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