FL2: Barnet v Torquay - 6th Nov 2012

Just a couple of points as they are mentioned here...

I thought Bodin was absolutely fantastic last night. He was leading the Barnet defenders a merry dance and they couldn't get near him. He was going this way and that and taking the ball with him. Utterly unplayable.

Yes, his shooting wasn't calibrated correctly but the number of times he wriggled into goalscoring positions was amazing. I've seen him have ineffective matches for us over the past season and a bit, but last night wasn't one of them.

Confidence shot away? Not a chance.
Aim needs tweaking? Yes, certainly. When that happens, hold on tight!



The stumbling block is that the borrowing club pays for loan players. With transfer fees (often) being negligible, it's the wages that small clubs can't afford, and if we borrow a player from a Championship club or higher then the wages will be very expensive and out of our budget.

not just the wages but more often than not they want a fee for you to take someone on loan. I believe we paid £25k to Barry Fry for Rendell to come on loan

That was always the case for Fry who would stock-pile young strikers and then loan them out at a profit. At various points over the past years he's had as many as five strikers out on loan at any given point!

If you can find a taker then you've got guaranteed income for a year.

Rene Howe was one of those.

I agree totally.

We can filter what we see on this or any forum against what we have seen with our own eyes.

We know that certain posters will report games we have seen exactly as we saw them. We know that others will write stuff that is totally at odds with what we have observed ourselves.

So when we don't go to a game, we are able to attach more weight to the comments of certain posters than to others.

Without that perspective, there would be a great danger of accepting the loudest or most repetitive voices as gospel.

A few people saying the same thing would become "by all accounts" and before you know it would become "the truth"

You'd then get people dreaming up far-fetched theories to prove that "the truth" was true even if it wasn't.

If I judged all other League 2 teams by their message boards, I would end up thinking every manager in the division was clueless, picked his favourites and had no plan b. I'd end up thinking that the players of every team just could not be bothered.

That would lead me to conclude that this was a very poor quailty league that we could so easily be top of if only we weren't cursed with a manager who is clueless, picks his favourites and has no plan b and with players who could not be bothered.

That would be very sad indeed.

Football message boards are a bit like alcohol - great in moderation, but don't let your dependence get out of control.