By Nathan Jackson
November 25 2006

Ironically, it's pretty easy to deflect from today's defeat as it was the most encouraging performance in November. Out of the 4 defeats in November, this was the only one where City weren't outplayed for the majority of the game but at the end of the day, a defeat is a defeat.

So, 4 defeats in a row but the most frustrating thing about this one was that we had to score both of Wrexham’s goals for them to beat us and it was easy to see why they are struggling at the wrong end of the table, however, it was also easy to see why we’re struggling to stay in the right end of the table and worryingly, you can’t see that ending but at least this week we didn’t seemingly give up after the opposition scored which would have made it 4 games in a row.

I’ll start with the positives and the obvious one is Matt Birley, easily the best player on the pitch for the Imps and you can tell he’s from a higher division, his balls into the box were dangerous and hd we had players actually bothered to get into the box, then we’d have scored for fun. It was nice to see a player not only chase the ball all over the pitch but also not being afraid to get stuck in to the tackles, this was a very refresing change.

However, Birley was definitely not the only player who had a good game for the Imps and despite not being on the pitch for long, substitutes Brown and Gritton had a positive impact on the game and the funniest thing was that Gritton kept mis-hitting the ball but it constantly went to where he wanted it to go.He is someone who I feel hasn’t been given a fair chance in the first team and the fact that he’s scored in his only start this season says it all.

However, there were also one of two players who had very bad games. Not although he scored the goal (well, the goal that counted for us anyway), Mark Stallard’s lack of involvement in the game has become a very unwelcome trend over the last few weeks. I can’t recall seeing a striker so unwilling to "roll his sleeves up." Effort was at a minimum and if he actually put some effort in for more than those breif seconds that lead to the goal, we’d have a far greater chance of scoring goals because Forrester was practically on his own and in that sense, was kept very quiet.

Now, I really rate Lee Frecklington, he’s the most exciting youngster I’ve seen since watching Beckham, Scholes et/al just over 10 years ago at Manchester United but I have to say that he was pretty bad today. He just didn’t seem to be "at the races" and creation from the midfield was very limited to say the least.

Now Wrexham, despite beating us were quite bad and as I mentioned earlier, the fact that neither of their shots were going in before the deflections, says it all about City’s lucky at the minute. As bad as City were at times, there were very few times where they put us under pressure and had Stallard put more effort in, we’d have won that game by miles.