NL: Torquay United v Altrincham 5:20pm 22 October 2022

The new ben Gerring though gerring wss a better fooballer and defenderr. My god we've got some donkeys at the back with little positional sense. That first half display was truly shocking allowing their attackers space and time to shoot how many times? Someone needs to get hold of the bloody lot of them and show them the replay. X Rated in football ing terms and whatts really narking is we dont learn from week to week. The goal that nearly beat us from another cross was typical a free header Omar in no mans kand after just coming on. They're just not good enough we need some proper defenders in the back line and a defensive midfield leader to organise.

The players have heart, that is true hector, they don't give up and that resulted in a point. However, unless there is some major surgery to the team, the back line in particular, we are going back down to regional football. Defensively todays performance was truly embarrassing, the manager has to be accountable for that. I can't see 4 worse teams than us in this division and am convinced we are going to be relegated. As for Johnson, I doubt he is going anywhere- any other club would have sacked him weeks ago.

Certainly a good game for the neutral watching on the television. As for ourselves, particularly in the first half, defensively we were shambolic and were unlucky not to go into the halftime break 5-0 down. Thought we passed the ball around better during the first 15 minutes but there were very few positives to take from the first half. Lovett did well with the penalty but maybe could have done better for the first goal which went through his legs and time and again whenever he saved the ball it kept coming out into danger areas and Altrincham capitalised on this for their second. How they didn’t get more, I don’t know with one attempt knocked over the bar from inside the 6 yard box. Also we seemed to leave one of their players free on the edge of our box time and time again for corners / set pieces which they of course exploited.

The second half started with Altrincham having another shot on goal which Lovett again parried out into the area but from this we were able to counter and Jarvis did some good work having a shot and then forcing a corner from the rebound. Hall has scored a lot of goals for us from corners and once again was able to direct a clean header into the bottom left hand corner of the goal to give us some hope and more importantly confidence. From this we started to look more dangerous and put a lot of pressure on their goal with it finally telling with Hall once again the provider converting a cross on the left to knock the ball in from just outside the 6 yard box. With just over 10 minutes to go, Hall to his surprise was substituted, no doubt game management with lots of Tuesday games coming up but he was clearly surprised and not too happy being on a hat-trick.

You could argue that it worked well as after some more good work to cross on the left, Lapslie was able to score with his first touch. Whether Hall could have argued, if you had given me another two more minutes on the pitch then I would have had my hat-trick is another thing! So 10 minutes to hold out and I remarked to my sister that we were going to need another goal for an unlikely win as I could see us conceding again.

This occurred duly five minutes later with Marshall who was having a mare of a game slipped to leave their right winger free to run into the area with Okoli having to leave a player he was marking to block him and it was that player that got the ball and using some good footwork was able to slot home into the far corner to equalise. Marshall then did his thing to completely unnecessarily earn a straight red and then from the resulting free kick some more bad defending saw them head home for what looked like a winner with just one minute of normal time remaining. However there is still spirit in the side and despite being numerically disadvantaged were still pressing forward and in the closing minute a Moxey long throw saw the ball come back to him again which he fed through to Jarvis and then onto Crowe ( who made some good runs going forward in the second half) on the edge of the penalty area who hit the ball first time with the outside of his boot to swerve the ball past the left-hand post for a last gasp equaliser in a topsy-turvy match where both teams led in the last 10 minutes but Altrincham will be the more disappointed having had the chance to put things to bed in the first half and then taking the lead again so late on in the game.