In the latest of his regular blog's Hillary Street-Ender takes us back to Tuesday evening's Sky Bet League 1 clash between Walsall and Rochdale, before looking ahead to this weekend's league clash with Port Vale where he considers whether the Saddlers can really sustain a play-off push.
The visit to Doncaster saw us achieve our fourth away win on the bounce but what we need to do now is to back it up with a decent result at home. Our home form over the last two or three seasons has been pretty woeful and has certainly held us back. Rochdale stop off at Bescot this evening and we can only hope that the game takes a different turn to the fixture at Spotland early in the season. That evening we were hammered by four goals to nil and might have lost by twice that margin had the home side not eased off once they’d built up a commanding lead. As the old joke often has it, we were lucky to get nil so abject were we particularly during the first half. We extracted a modicum of revenge by knocking them out of the Paint Pot on their own patch but it would be nice to get one over them in a game where league points are at stake. After facing Andy Butler on Saturday tonight’s game offers the chance of coming up against Febian Brandy, who doesn’t make the Dale starting eleven but may well appear as a substitute. New signing Hiwula made a goal-scoring debut when coming off the bench at Donny and that seems to have been enough to earn him a starting place this evening, something that suggests that Deano doesn’t have much faith in Grimes being an adequate replacement for Bradshaw. He’s not the only one.
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The game gets underway and for the first twenty minutes we give the kind of display that I can last remember seeing at Meadow Lane last season. We tear our visitors to pieces and find ourselves leading by three goals with less than a quarter of the game gone. We knock the ball around quickly and look likely to find the net every time we go forward. The first goal comes when a raid through the Dale left back position ends with the concession of a corner. Forde swings his kick into the box where O’Connor’s header finds a way past the massed ranks on the line. Almost before we’ve absorbed the fact that we’ve taken the lead we find that it’s been doubled, this time by Forde, who latches onto a ball over the all-at-seas left back before steadying himself to fire a low, acutely-angled shot past the keeper right in front of the visiting Lancastrians. Normally we knock the ball around nicely enough but fail to make the most of our possession so we’re stunned just a few minutes afterward when we find ourselves three-nil up. Another attack through their left-back area ends with a low ball played across the box to Hiwula, who swivels before firing a low shot home to leave us wondering just how many more we might go on to score. Sadly that’s the end of our scoring for the night as Hill makes a double substitution to shore up the Dale defence and from this point on Rochdale effectively nullify us. The rest of the half is relatively eventless but the boys receive a standing ovation as they leave the pitch in search of their orange segments. Three-nil seems a safe enough lead but a goal quickly after the break for our visitors might bring a different complexion to proceedings. Frustratingly that’s exactly what happens when Vincenti shoots past the exposed O’Donnell for a virtual carbon copy of the Forde goal. It’s what we’d dreaded but we still have a two-goal lead so no need to panic just yet. Eight minutes elapse before our lead is cut to just a single goal when Eastham slams home a loose ball after some very dodgy back four work. From that point we see what can best be described as a mass withdrawing of our team into it’s shell and everything that had been so impressive about the way we began the game is now notable by it’s absence. Everywhere we look on the pitch there’s a man in a red shirt suffering the jitters and even one in yellow between the posts who now looks more nervous than I can ever remember seeing him. It begins to seem inevitable that Rochdale will find an equaliser although we do manage the odd sortie up-field, with Cook and Taylor putting long-range efforts high, wide or both. Somehow we hang on until the final whistle to find that the three points gained have moved us up two places to tenth, now just a couple of places short of a play-off place.
READ HSE'S PREVIOUS BLOG 'A GOOD ROVERS RETURN', HERE
If we can claim three more when Port Vale visit on Saturday we might just find ourselves in the top six, mainly due to the fact that there’s a significant points gap between the top four and the rest. Whether we’re good enough to maintain a play-off challenge is debatable to say the least and I really don’t think we’d be ready for promotion were we to achieve it. To come away from the last two games with a pair of victories is an impressive feat, it has to be said, especially considering we’ve had to make do without Bradshaw. There’s no news as to when he’ll be back but it’s probably safe to say that he won’t be available for selection on Saturday.
By: Hillary Street-Ender.
