Firstly, this will be the last NCM Diary for a few days as I am off to Latitude Festival in a few hours. I'll be back on Monday to mull over anything that might have happened over the weekend (a striker, perhaps?). Enjoy Mansfield, anyone who's going.
What can we learn from the friendly at Kettering Town?
I'm not long back from last night's friendly at Kettering and, the first thing to say, is that it wasn't a particularly good game of football. It was effectively a mixture of Notts' bright young things and dispensable stiffs, whilst the hosts were made up mainly of trialists, giving the match a pretty disjointed feel from start to finish. The Poppies created the better chances whilst Notts dominated possession. We seemed to grow in both confidence and control as the game went on and there was fleeting glimpses of some very good football - two or three moves were quick, incisive and nearly carved out some really good chances.
The one thing that really struck me from the game was the differences in how comfortable some of the players were on the ball. Allen has clearly drilled in to them that he wants them to play simple passes and retain possession, looking to patiently open up space. This is something that the young players seem pretty confidence with, whereas some of the more experienced ones are really struggling. George Nicholas started in midfield and, although he stills seems to be adjusting to the slightly smaller amount of time you get at senior level, when he has space he can spot some lovely passes. Whilst he gave it away a lot tonight, you can tell he's comfortable on the ball and knows the right pass to play. A similar thing can be said for Kyle Dixon, Lewis Whiteley, Haydn Hollis and the very young Jahidi. They all have a good touch and look very comfortable with the ball at their feet. That is commendable and a lot of praise has to go to Michael Johnson and the other youth team staff as that is the right way to bring footballers through.
However, it was fairly shocking that some of our more senior players looked so awkward and uncomfortable with the ball at their feet. Putting Chilvers' defensive calamities aside, he looked unhappy with the ball in his possession and paniced, slicing it forward when a simple pass was on offer, on numerous occasions. Ricky Ravenhill is the king of the 'aimless punt forward without looking' and he gave the ball away a ridiculous amount of times tonight. Jon Harley also seemed to suffer from this. If they're unable to retain possession effectively and panic whenever put under the slightest bit of pressure in a half-paced pre-season friendly against a side from two levels below, i'd be worried if any of those three were appearing for us on a regular basis this year.
Why Martin Allen is winning us over (a bit)
I will have confess, I wasn't particularly enamoured with the appointment of Martin Allen as manager. I think I may have called it a 'joke' on the messageboard. I've got perfectly logical reasons for that, he failed horribly in his last proper job at Cheltenham Town and was notorious for his tendency to up sticks and leave clubs on a whim and his attritional, long ball style of football. But plenty seems to have changed from that for him to be starting to win me over.
My main issue with his appointment was that it seemed to smack of short-termism, an issue that has blighted this club for a long time. His unique style of motivation may have kept us up, but I feared that we would be stuck in the same position a year later as he didn't strike me as someone who put much emphasis into slowly building a team and the club's foundations. But by putting into place a scouting system (it's utterly irrational that we didn't have one in the first place) and showing a willingness to allow the young players at the club to be involved with the first team and get their chance, he's changing my mind on that. We have to look to the future as a club, we aren't big enough or rich enough to buy our way into the Championship. We have to do it by developing young players and being willing to take a risk on up-and-coming talents with a bit of potential, which Allen seems willing to do. It's tactically that he has surprised me the most, though.
After battling through the last few games of last season, he seems to have decided that a pass-and-move, possession orientated style is the way forward. He is absolutely right. Football has evolved recently to move towards being fluid and being able to keep possession, it isn't enough to merely be 'organised' any more. This is now filtering through to the lower levels and the teams getting promotions and progressing are playing possession based styles and retaining the ball. Only Stoke City and Stevenage really achieved success last season by playing a different style, the most successful sides were passing sides. That is especially true in League One.
The top eight teams in the division last year were, without doubt, the eight best passing sides. That is to be expected of Brighton, Southampton, Huddersfield and Peterborough - they had the budgets and the talent to mean that nothing less would really be accepted. But Milton Keynes, Bournemouth, Leyton Orient and Rochdale aren't big clubs, they are well run clubs with the right philosophies. Orient impressed me the most, their 2-0 win over Notts at Brisbane Road was the best incisive passing performance I saw against us all year, they tore an 'organised' Paul Ince side to shreds. All of this under the stewardship of Russell Slade, someone else I thought was becoming something of a relic. He achieved success at Grimsby and Yeovil through playing attritional, organised football, but this backfired at Brighton and he seemed finish. He revolutionised Orient's style, however, and they became a fantastic side to watch. Orchestrated by the previously discarded Dean Cox and other unremarkable signings like Matt Spring and Alex Revell, they were unlucky to miss out on the play-offs. That is what we must emulate, with similar things going for Bournemouth and Rochdale. Milton Keynes managed to finish fifth with a budget that was mainly being taken up by overpaid Paul Ince signings (sound familiar?), but they overcame that thanks to Karl Robinson's eye for a bargain, willingness to blood young players and passing philosophy.
The 4-5-1 system that Allen looks set to use is also something that has impressed me; five of those eight teams employed it last season and the three who didn't - Huddersfield, Southampton and Brighton - really had too much talent upfront to leave players out. It allows you to control a game and control the ball, something that is becoming increasingly important when it comes to developing a successful side. We currently lack the striker to spearhead it and the creative midfielder to orchestrate it, but Allen is certainly moving in the right direction.
How do we get rid of Liam Chilvers?
A conversation at half time at Kettering today gave me a chilling thought - who is going to want to sign Liam Chilvers if he keeps putting in hopeless displays against mediocre non-league sides? Well, I have an idea.
Owen Hargreaves is currently using Youtube to try and convince clubs that he is worth signing despite the fact that his knees are made out of papier mache. By uploading a minute-long clip of him using a treadmill without suffering a career-threatening injury (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMy-qBo0gbw), he thinks that clubs will be convinced to give a formerly useful player another chance. It seems to be working too, with Sven coming out and saying that Owen is welcome to trial at Leicester with a view to earning a deal.
Now, if it's that easy for a player who has played six minutes in two years due to a series of injuries to convince a club that he is worth a shot, offloading Chilvers to an easily impressed manager should be simple. We could consider a series of short training ground videos, where Liam can win some headers against young Jahidi, demonstrating his aerial prowess. He can then be shown beating Ben Burgess to a long ball, showing the burst of pace that he possesses. He could even control a ball moving at him at a slow pace, to demonstrate the sublime first touch that all graduates of the Arsenal academy have. A quick email to each League Two manager and the offers will be flooding in, I guarantee it.
In fact, why stop there? Social media has other ways of moving on an unwanted lumbering centre half. Yeovil Town manager Terry Skiverton recently signed Kieran Agard, a young forward release by Everton, on the recommendation of his Twitter followers. He's also asked for them to suggest other potential signings for his Yeovil side. I suggest that we all drop Terry a brief tweet (http://www.twitter.com/terryskiverton) explaining just how good Chilvers is. If it can persuade him to sign a completely raw and untested kid, we should have no trouble getting him to take a player who's come through the youth system at Arsenal and has years of Championship experience under his belt off our hands.