Torquay United V Barrow 14th March 2009

Nicky Wroe is a bit of an enigma - as are so many talented players. At the start of the season, I thought he looked awful - the nadir being the Ebbsfleet game. Bucks must have thought the same as he dropped him after that one.

To his credit, when Wroe returned he showed signs of having worked really hard at his game and he was probably the pivotal figure in our superb winning run.

Recently, he's been a bit in and out and when he's gone missing it has made us look bad. I think for the last two games, Buckle has probably looked at a couple of different ways to add a bit more steel to our midfield without sacrificing Wroe's talents. At Alty, we played a formation that accommodated Thompson, Hargreaves and Wroe in centre midfield.

I didn't think we would go with the same formation at home, but we varied the theme by keeping Thompson's energy and drive in midfield and moving Wroe wide - although he was moved back to the middle later on. We often talk about battling to take a grip on the game early on, and then opening up the game with impact subs as the clock ticks on. If we stuck to this formation, we could have a "two for the price of one" impact in that a winger can come on to get at a tiring full back AND Wroe can move into the middle where a little more space may open up later in the game.

If you think back to Leroy's days, we played the first season with Jason Fowler in centre midfield alongside Russell. In that season we played the most glorious open entertaining football I have ever seen at Plainmoor, but we didn't pick up enough points to get in the play-offs because of the times we lost the battle to get the right to play our game. In Leroy's second season, Fowler was pushed out wide so that Hockers could come into the middle with Russell.

You could argue that that was wasting Fowler's talents, but I would argue that it was giving a way to hide his weaknesses and a stage to allow him to concentrate on doing what he did best. Results suggest that it worked a treat.

I'm off to enjoy the sunshine now too!

The frustrating thing about Wroe is that you see glimpses of such excellent talent. I know that he would not be playing at BSP level if he were more consistent, but he can be both brilliant and awful within minutes, never mind from game to game.