Leaderboard

Christ, we've been complaining about Short-staff all window then when we finally address that.... I think the loan system is good, I'm just not sure of our strategy, or if there is one at all. Longstaff is probably exactly the type of player we should be considering. Someone that we can't afford but can improve our first eleven. Jenks is a squad filler, like Edmondson and the various others before him. They only serve to compete with our young players for game time, devaluing them (Campbell versus Jenks). It should be the same when we loan our players too. They should be going for 90 regular 70-90 minutes of football. Accordingly we should be sending them to places where they're good enough to get those minutes.

Cape Town Utd

They’re a good team but I’m not having this narrative that came about around the time their 2nd goal went in that they’re the footballing equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. They’re about the level of the Rijeka team we beat or the Maribor team we narrowly lost to. The difference is that we didn’t seem to have any effective plan to give them any trouble in defence or how to contain their attacking threat. We looked completely unprepared tonight.

We are really struggling to create anything. Qarabag are no mugs but if we are ever going to get to a european Group stage this is the level of opposition we need to be able to beat. We are clearly a long way off still.