An early Donnie / Bristol Rovers Match Day Thread

Some neat,promising football at times, no over use of the long ball, but four more goals conceded speaks for itself.
Irritated by the constant,unnecessary free kicks given away again 30-40 yards out, particularly by Eimar in the first half.
It was the same last week, particularly pointless, when we look so poor defending set pieces.
Kilgore has looked uncomfortable, both in and out of possession.
It was alarming the way Doncaster sliced through mid field so easily, can’t see what Grant brings to the team so far.
Mitchell- Lawson was anonymous, but Hanlon battled well, and showed good control.
Doncaster always looked capable of scoring, we didn’t.
Garner hasn’t helped himself with the Radio Bristol post match interview, and is lucky there are no crowds to face up to.

your not hiring Alex Ferguson then?   ☹️

Back to shadow boxing Jimmy.
Shadows don't hit back.
🙂

you have hit the nail on the head Groiny.   This is the pivotal question: include last season in the reckoning, before he was given a new squad, or not. if Garner had only been manager since August, I would be surprised if anyone would be squealing for the sack tonight, if every performance and result since Boxing Day is in the consideration, there isn’t much argument to give him much more time.

Even if we remember last season in the assessment, there is still some argument to give him more time, it’s been a tough run of fixtures, a lot of personnel changes to the starting 11 between seasons.

Obviously it can’t go on like this, conceding soft goals means you need to score more good goals to win games, we currently look very much more likely to fail to score in a match than fail to concede.

Having said that, Hanlon does impress me and I am pleased he is here, I’m right behind him despite lack of goals whilst he settles in.

As we see more of it, do we wonder if, despite talented Young players, it’s the fact so many are inexperienced that is impacting results. Can you fashion a good team from the most talented young players out of other teams, or does it only work when inexperienced players are blended with experienced players.

Hard one to sum up today, because all the improvements we have been asking for they did deliver improvement today, passing, ball retention, off ball movement, shape, press and turnover. Despite having shipped two soft goals, the way we were playing at 2.1 I still fancied us. And that’s actually a promising thing to say really, considering the score line.

Maybe a 4 4 2 is better for the squad we have. It means one of the 3 centre backs is benched rather than played at full back, likewise we have a glut of wide forwards where only four would be involved. But it will give us wide players working in tandem with full back, and best of all give us 2 up top for more cutting edge.

Can't argue with you player / tactical assessment, but I suspect that every player here has already heard enough from Ben to work out that he has zero idea how to deal with actual match situations, so they've probably all stopped listening to him already.

That short YouTube video of Jimmy whateverhisnamewas getting sparked out, it was partly humour and partly about his opponent looking at him obviously being clueless, taking a step back and then just whacking him on the chin. That's what almost every opponent has done to Rovers since Ben arrived.

I didn't watch today's game, so don't know if we were actually in the game, but the exact same thing keeps happening, so my gut feeling is that we probably weren't in that much danger of coming home with any points,

But there may be another problem with getting rid of him. If you sack your manager 3 League and 5 competitive games into the season based on form, it's hardly a great advert for the way the club is run and could well hamper recruitment?

You can see enough from those ''highlights'' to see that we are a total shambles.

Garner just has to go.

What on earth was going on with that first piece of action? Our keeper clears the ball, before it's bounced we pass it back from the halfway line to one of their attackers That's park football.

Summed up by players arguing with each other at the end. That's been a theme since Loser Boy landed, nobody has a clue who is supposed to be doing what, it causes frustration and leads to players at each other's throats.

Ok, one goal should not have been given for the push in the back but come on Ben, the other three goals were poor defensively. What exactly are the defensive coaches doing? We look clueless at the back. Seven goals in three games tells a story. This is going to be a long and painful season.

I prefer this measured post to your one 15 minutes later.  The highlight package is horrendous, the goals are so soft and stupid, but don’t tell the whole story.   Those of us watching it did feel in the game at 2.1.  The threads real-time posts reflect this.  We were playing pretty well all through, punctuated by those nonsense goals.  None of them came from any spells of pressure that makes it feel likely you are going to concede any moment, like what Ipswich done to us last quarter last week.  At 2.1 we had couple of decent chances to complete comeback from two down.   

there is a pattern I concede, for 70 minutes last week and for much of this week the actual game play was pretty even, but that, as your metaphor pointed out, means zilch if you are a boxer with a glass chin.     

The rest of the world is wrong...

I couldn't see clearly from the clip who scored, but our number 17 was definitely out on the left touchline when the goal bound shot was struck so it definitely wasn't Daly.

Even though the BBC says Daly scored - the writeup says "Before the hosts could settle, they were pegged back when Leahy lobbed Josef Bursik from the corner of the box after 32 minutes."