NL: Torquay United v Woking 3pm 29th August 2022

Very disappointing.

We don’t have a great side, unfortunately; I think the way our squad has been decimated of its best players over two summers is too big a job for anyone to put right in 4 weeks of a season and anyone who thought this season was going to be one where we challenged needed their heads examining anyway.

We have an inordinate amount of injuries (for some reason) and even with those players back, I don’t see the likes of Jarvis scoring many (based on his record everywhere else he’s played). Pre-season, I thought we’d finish about 14th but revising that to 17th/18th for now.

Football clubs that prosper do not change their managers (particularly good ones) at the first sign of a bad run. GJ was right in that we have to take the rough with the smooth and he has earned the right to let him try and put things right in the way he has done each other time there has been a bad run. No wonder he sounds demoralised; who wouldn’t be when you reflect back on the players you had and look at what all you could get as replacements. Although, I do think McGavin is the standout player and would have added to our squad over the last two years had he been here.

I really can’t stand Darren Sarll and his teams always seemed well-versed in the dark arts and that was clear today. There was weak officiating as well but that’s not why we lost. Woking are better than us at the moment. They should have scored a few times early on so we did well to keep it at 0-0 at the break.

The first 20 minutes of the second half, we were the better side; the team visibly looked more up for it than they had done in the first half and although Andrews did his normal thing of shooting straight at the keeper when clean through it did feel like a goal might come.

The melee that occurred just before the goal happened so quickly and so much going on that I don’t blame the ref for not sending anyone off as it was impossible to tell but it will be interesting to see what did happen unless TUFC sanitise the highlights and edit the incident out.

When the goal came it was easy to think it was going to be our day - Plainmoor had been rocking just beforehand and the goal was a great header and cross by Marshall and Omar.. my concern was the timing and that it left us too long to hold out and once they equalised there was only going to be one winner and once they went ahead, I thought it was going to end up something like 1-5 at that point.

It was calamity from then on and the fears that our almost impregnable defence was just some sort of freak occurrence came to fruition and the reality that a defence containing Lovett, Crowe, Marshall, Omar and Wyatt is a recipe for disaster (although to be fair to the latter, he’d gone off by the time everything happened).

So we doubled both our goals for and our goals against in one match and I am sure this will almost delight the self-proclaimed experts on FB and the rarely read BPIR and I guess it’s lucky Clarke Osborne doesn’t have a password so he can read about what he should be doing as he would then surely be banging down the door of Corinthian Casuals and demanding the signature of their manager.

Los Iguanas?

Chelston would have had it for £6.