LEAGUE TWO. TUESDAY, 3rd OCTOBER 2023.

Referee Ruins Accrington Stanley derby.

Morecambe’s all-time Bogey Team visited the Mazuma Mobile Stadium this evening for the latest EFL encounter between themselves and one of their nearest neighbours. Morecambe have played Accrington Stanley in League One and League Two twenty-six times previously. And lost fifteen of these games. So – regardless of either team’s current form, there was a Monkey on Morecambe’s backs tonight as they tried to improve on their very poor record of only four victories so far.

Former Shrimps’ star forward John Coleman’s outfit have been struggling this campaign, having accompanied Morecambe back into League Two at the end of last season from the division above. They have lost three of their five most recent league games, including last Saturday’s 1-3 home defeat by Stockport County and their previous match, where they lost 2-0 at next-to-bottom club Tranmere Rovers. “Coley” has been famous for making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear year after year at Accrington. Just like his Opposite Number Derek Adams, he is faced with a situation every season where limited resources alone force him to meld together a side of loanees, youngsters and players often looking for a new start to their careers into an effective unit. And he usually succeeds. Last Saturday, though, three key players he selected to face Stockport – goalkeeper Jon McCracken (aged 23) and central defenders Lewis Shipley and Brad Hills (both just 19) – were all loanees from Norwich City. You could be forgiven for concluding from this that they should already have a pretty good understanding between themselves. But Mr Coleman’s analysis of why his team lost at home last Saturday was pretty brutal and they were central to this:

“I don’t think we grasped the importance of the game. Sadly, we haven’t grasped the importance of most games this season. Probably that’s what you get when you have a younger squad.  Loan players who are still coming to terms with playing in games that really matter. The loan players we had playing (on) Saturday: Joe Gubbins; Lewis Shipley; Brad Hills; Josh Andrews; only Josh has really had kind of any experience playing in the league.  It’s going to be a learning curve for them. Some of the things we told them to do just went out the window. Possibly, the pressure situation gets to them. Their retention of detail – or retention of facts – isn’t there. That’s something we’ve just got to keep working on.”

Asked if he saw any parallels between the financial positions of his own club and Morecambe, he replied:

“Morecambe’s operating costs are a lot higher than ours. They will have players on more money than our players. But it’s a churlish argument, that. When it boils down to it, it’s eleven v eleven. It hasn’t bothered us in the past. It shouldn’t bother us now because we have lost a couple.”

Ged Brannan is now a member of the Morecambe coaching staff, having been at Accrington Stanley earlier in the season. John Coleman said about Ged’s position in his new job:

“It is definitely an advantage because Ged will have a working knowledge of how we operate – and we won’t have it on them. So that’s definitely an advantage. He’s a really good footballing person, Ged. I’m sure he’ll have a calming influence on Morecambe and how they approach their games. He’s going to good people. I know Derek well; I know John McMahon from my playing days as well. They are good people to go and get involved with. I know our fans have to have their banter with Morecambe and the rivalry but I had so many good years there as a player that it’s hard for me not to have an emotional tie.”

The man Ged Brannan is now working for took a different spin on the role of loan players to that taken by his Opposite Number in East Lancashire. Derek Adams told the media the day before tonight’s clash:

“We’ve got younger players that have come on loan or on a permanent basis that need guidance. We’ve got a number of senior players that do that. They lead the younger ones forward. It’s my job – and the coaching staff job as well – to be really focused on them and look after them on a daily basis. That’s why so many Premier League clubs (and) Championship clubs put their players here. They know that they are coached; taught – they are brought up in the right way. To have a technical director at Brighton to have his son here tells you loads – David Weir played so many times for Everton and Rangers and Scotland. To get that trust – you look at Michael Mellon; Mickey Mellon; his father – it tells you something when a Manager gives you his boy to look after. I take that as a huge positive and I think that we – as football people – know how to treat players properly.”

As far as tonight’s game with Accrington was concerned, Derek added:

“It’s a football match that you have to be up for. Accrington Stanley play in a certain type of way: with energy and enthusiasm to go and play; to go and create chances; to go forward. We all understand that. We’ve got to then be sure when we regain the ball to pick-up the next pass because we quite quickly can get on the end of them because the space is going to be open. We understand that that’s the way Accrington play and they have had great success doing it. We’ve got younger players – and this is no disrespect to them or anything – they don’t know from game to game what they’re going into because they haven’t had that experience before. That can be a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that they don’t know what the game is about. The bad thing is that it’s a local derby and they have to know what the game’s about. We will give them pointers before the match and re-establish what the fixture means. The atmosphere tomorrow night will be brilliant with both sets of supporters pushing the players on. I think it will be an entertaining game.”

Asked if he saw parallels between the two clubs off the field, the King added:

“Both clubs have come through on a similar path. They’ve found themselves in League One and then they’ve found themselves in League Two. They’re the same as us – season on season, they have to change their squad about. When you’re in that situation, both clubs have got to recruit in a certain way. I get loads of players thrown at me but it’s not always possible to go and sign them so then I have to pick-out the ones that A) are affordable and B) are suitable for this football club. Accrington are exactly the same.”

This was his take on the Ged Brannan effect:

“I think that he can provide an insight. He has already talked to me about certain things. But I’m sure Accrington will change them up before tomorrow night – it’s only natural that you would do that.”

The weather in north Lancashire has been iffy and appropriately autumnal recently. Today was no different, with keen winds chasing occasional showers – some of them absolutely torrential – across the already sodden ground. So the match started on a heavy pitch. In the absence of the suspended Donald Love, Jacob Bedeau wore the Captain’s armband for Morecambe tonight.

Stanley played as they traditionally have done over the years. The John Coleman recipe is always to have physically big players who are prepared to mix it in the spine of his team. Collectively, the type of football they play is usually pretty agricultural and the team as a whole always sails as close to the wind as they are allowed to by the match officials. So the one thing that is essential in any Accrington Stanley game is a Referee who is not going to allow them to get away with the shirt-pulling; holding and play-acting that they constantly attempt to get away with. If the Man in the Middle doesn’t stamp down on this sort of cynical cheating early doors, teams like Stanley will keep on doing it. Why shouldn’t they? So tonight was never going to be much of a contest because the central character in this drama – the Referee – was absolutely useless. Keith Stroud is apparently a Championship referee. On tonight’s display, he is not fit to be put in charge of a box of matches, let alone matches which actually mean anything.

The visitors must have won the toss because one of their spoiling tactics tonight was to play the first half with their backs towards their sparse little band of supporters at the largely empty away end. They forced the first chance of the game when Stuart Moore made a routine save from Jack Nolan after two minutes. Morecambe had a better one when, following an excellent cross from the very impressive Michael Mellon, Jordan Slew walloped the ball straight at Jon McCracken in the visitors’ goal. Mellon himself missed after eighteen minutes, by which time an over-excited Jimmy Bell – Stanley’s Assistant Manager – had already been booked by the officious little man in the impeccably tidy black strip. I bet all his pencils are exactly the same length – these are the things that clearly really matter to him. But the Referee had already allowed obviously trivial things in his view – such as a series of fouls by the visitors, usually involving holding or pulling – to go completely unpunished. Conversely, though, he was very quick to give free kicks when the men in the predominantly white strip made a meal of any challenge, fair or otherwise. When goalie McCracken inexplicably left his area and ran towards the left touchline to clear a through ball; made a complete mess of it and clearly committed an offence when trying to recover, a stricter referee would have sent him off. But Mr Stroud didn’t even award a free kick. Right at the end of the half, Jake Taylor was having both of his arms pinned to his sides by an overzealous Stanley defender. This was right on the left-hand edge of the away penalty area from Jake’s point of view. What happened? Keith Stroud gave a free-kick against him for reasons only he could explain. Throughout the game, the huge unit known as Josh Andrews used his sheer size to gain often unfair advantages. The foul he committed on James Connolly after 13 minutes deserved a yellow card on its own. He then committed another bad foul on the same player with 48 minutes on the clock. With just over an hour played, Andrews again felled Connolly with a lunge crude and sufficiently out-of-control enough for him to be sent off for on its own by many referees. But Mr Stroud just booked him and gave him a lecture as the monster towered over him and literally laughed in his face. In injury time at the end of the game, Andrews mysteriously went down off the ball and started putting on a performance which suggested that his end might be nigh. The referee stopped the game. At which point – asked by the clearly very concerned Ref if he wouldn’t mind leaving the field for treatment – Accrington’s enormous number 19 made a miraculous recovery. He should have been booked both for feigning injury and blatant time-wasting but Keith Stroud indulged him yet again. Maybe he was afraid of this giant. Just before this, Slew had taken a fierce free-kick from Joe Pritchard full in the face and fell to the ground without putting his arms out to cushion his fall. This is usually a sign that a player has been knocked-out, however temporarily. Referee Stroud indicated to the touchline that he wanted a Concussion Protocol to be carried out on Jordan. But it didn’t happen. This failure could endanger the player’s health and welfare. Which poses the question: if the Concussion Protocol is going to be ignored by Referees in circumstance like this – what is the point of having it in the first place? Shall I go on? No – we haven’t got time…

This wasn’t a good game to watch – Accrington performances rarely are because of the attritional style of play they favour. But it was simply ruined by a chief official who never took control of proceedings and was far too eager throughout to indulge Stanley and their version of the Dark Arts. At the risk of sounding like Liz somebody-or-other who can be currently found in Manchester, it was a disgrace…

Morecambe took the lead when Connolly’s low shot after an effort from Slew went through a forest of legs and eluded a probably unsighted visiting goalkeeper in the sixty-fourth minute. Accrington equalised five minutes later when the man with the whistle adjudged Tom Bloxham to have fouled Shaun Whalley in the home penalty area. If he got this right, it would be one of very few decisions he made correctly all evening. Whether he did or not, Tommy Leigh scored confidently from the spot-kick.

The away goalkeeper looked panicky and unsure at times this evening and rode his luck when parrying shots or crosses back into the danger area instead of away from it on a few occasions. But – to be fair to him – he made some really good saves as well. He did brilliantly to turn a Mellon strike aside after forty minutes, diving low to his right in order to keep the ball out of the net. He did even better to deny JJ McKiernan a quarter of an hour later. But probably his best save of the night arrived in the 57^th minute when he leapt full-length to push a ferocious shot from Jordan Slew on the Morecambe left away for a throw-in on the other side of the field. Other than that, there’s not a lot to say. Shrimps Old Boy Kelvin Mellor headed a lob from Taylor off the Stanley goal-line in the first half. At the other end, Stuart Moore had little to do all evening apart from saving well from Pritchard although Accrington had quite a lot of possession at times. They were probably the slightly better team once they had equalised but Slew wasted a golden opportunity to win it for the Shrimps in the ninety-eighth minute. When unmarked and with the goal at his mercy, he contrived to blast a shot high and wide instead of hitting the target. But we must remember that Jordan was probably seeing four goalposts and two crossbars as well as a couple of goalkeepers in front of him following the blow to the head he had just suffered…

In truth, I don’t really think that either side deserved to win tonight and the game ended in a bore draw ruined by the appalling officiating.

The single point was enough to keep Morecambe in twelfth position in League Two. Stanley fell to fifteenth. This is what King Derek made of it:

“I thought the whole team were excellent. The way we passed the ball; found different options… If Accrington were closing a gap, we always moved and took other positions. They just understand the game very well for a young team.”

Morecambe: 1 Stuart Moore; 3 David Tutonda; 4 Jacob Bedeau (C) (Y); 7 Tom Bloxham (Y) (11 Adam Mayor 75’); 8 Eli King; 9 Michael Mellon; 10 JJ McKiernan; 12 Joel Senior (Y); 14 Jordan Slew; 18 Jake Taylor (16 Jacob Davenport 79’); 22 James Connolly.

Substitutes not used: 21 Adam Smith; 5 Farrend Rawson; 6 Yann Songo’o; 17 Cammy Smith; 19 Ethan Walker.

Accrington Stanley: 21 Jon McCracken; 4 Kelvin Mellor (7 Shaun Whalley (Y) 56’); 5 Brad Hills (Y); 8 Ben Woods; 9 Matt Lowe; 10 Joe Pritchard; 14 Rosaire Longelo (2 Lewis Shipley 88’); 16 Joe Gubbins (25 Aaron Pickles 56’); 17 Jack Nolan; 18 Tommy Leigh (22 Dan Martin 76’); 19 Josh Andrews (Y).

Substitutes not used: 61 Jack Cameron McIntyre; 12 Sebastian Quirk; 38 Connor O’Brien; 39 Josh Woods.

Ref: Keith Stroud.

Att: 3,458 (only 320 from Accrington.)