Next up: Hayes & Yeading
This week sees the Stags travel south to play Hayes and Yeading. The sides met earlier in the season and we won 3-1 thanks to a Rob Duffy hatrick. Good times.
Since then things have changed for both sides. We were in the play off spots and looking good whilst Hayes & Yeading were battling against relegation in their first season in the BSP. After todays news that Chester have been kicked out of the BSP (I will write something about it on here later on) we have lost 6 points. It means we are now 7 points off 5th place having played a game extra. On the other hand Hayes & Yeading have only lost 1 point and are 10 points clear of the last relegation spot. Good work for a team on probably the lowest budget in the league.
Normally I’d write a bit about players that had played for both sides but there isn’t any! So instead, I’ll write a bit about our opponents and the recent (ish) merge of two football teams into one. The two teams merged back in 2007 after it was decided it would be better to make a decent sized club out of two rather than having two small ones in such close proximity. I guess the main point about the merger was to raise the crowds and in turn get better players on the pitch. I don’t know what the two teams averaged 2 years ago, but this season Hayes & Yeading have averaged just 469 fans per home game. The lowest in the Blue Square Premier.
Still, this hasn’t stopped them being relatively successful on the pitch. Manager Garry Haylock has managed to guide his side to respectful 15th place in the table. After quite a slow start H & Y started to pick up form in mid October. They put together a run of 5 straight wins. Along the way they beat Cambridge at home 3-0, Wrexham away 2-0 and play off chasers Kettering 1-0. Really that is their only good run of results that they have managed to put together so far and have been rather inconsistent but have managed to keep picking up points along the way to keep themselves away from the relegation places.
They head into the match tomorrow unbeaten in 3, having picked up 7 points from a possible 9. The most worrying thing is that they have managed to score 10 goals in those games and in our last 3 games we have conceded 7. Doesn’t look to promising does it? We head into the game on the back of a 4-2 win plus we haven’t had a game for 2 weeks so the players should be fresh and up for the match. Luke Jones is back available for selection after he served his 2 game ban for his red card at Stevenage. So apart from Jake Speight and Ollie Hotchkiss, we have a fully fit squad to choose from.
In the last two games DH has gone for his favoured 4-3-3 formation away from home and opted for Gary Mills to be the holding midfielder instead of Matt Somner. I expect this will be same tomorrow with Nix and Challinor either side of him. Ryan Williams will probably be on the bench again as he never really gets chosen for away games because DH prefers strength and height away from home. The rest of the team kind of picks itself apart from central defence. With Luke Jones back he has the choice of four centre backs, I would opt for Foster and Garner myself.
Tomorrow is a must win game, if we lose it would take a brave man to say we are still in with a chance of getting promoted this season. I’m very confident that we can get a result down there tomorrow we just have to keep our concentration at the back.
Score prediction – Hayes and Yeading 0 – 2 Mansfield Town
Predicted team
Marriott
Silk-Foster-Jones-Nicholas
Challinor-Mills-Nix
Shaw-Duffy-Perry
