LEAGUE TWO. APRIL FOOLS’ DAY, TUESDAY 1st APRIL 2025.

Do Robins Want It Enough?

Two Robins have visited the coast of north-west Lancashire in the last few days. The first one – Swindon Town – returned to Wiltshire with nothing as Morecambe secured a double over them with the only goal of the game last Saturday. Tonight, Cheltenham Town’s Robins were the latest visitors to the Mazuma Mobile Arena to try and frustrate Morecambe’s frantic efforts to belatedly acquire sufficient points to start next season as a member of the EFL.

These Robins arrived in fourteenth place in League Two, comfortably seventeen points ahead of the Shrimps as Derek Adams’ team lay next to bottom of the division. Their recent form has been poor however: just one win in their last six league fixtures and four defeats, the most recent one being last Saturday on the Wirral, where they lost 2-0 against a frustratingly resurgent Tranmere Rovers.

There is bad blood between Derek and the Cheltenham Manager Michael Flynn.  This stretches back to the famous day at Wembley almost four years ago when Morecambe defeated Mr Flynn’s then club Newport County to enter League One for the only time in the Shrimps’ history.

During December, the Cheltenham Manager would have been gratified to some extent when his team beat an anaemic Morecambe 2-0 in Gloucestershire. In the twenty-nine previous meeting between the two clubs in all competitions, the Robins have won fourteen; the Shrimps just eight.

This is what Michael Flynn’s Australian Assistant Manager Aaron Downes had to say about the game prior to kick-off in the light of their defeat against Tranmere three days ago:

“There’s never in football a game that’s not important. There’s always a reason to perform to your best, whether that’s as an individual or as a collective. So it’s really important for all of us to regroup, re-gather and recollect our thoughts and really understand the importance that football means to us as individuals; to us as a collective team – but also to us as a football club. It’s important that we keep our energy levels and our commitment and enthusiasm for the rest of the season.”

For the Shrimps, Derek Adams made this assessment of the task facing his men tonight:

“They’re sitting on a good points total at this moment in time and they’ve got a mixture of youth and experience in the team. So it’s a challenge again because of where they are in the league but we’ve shown against Swindon that we can compete with that. We’ve got to win our matches to claw back the gap between us and the teams above us.”

When it was suggested to him that a couple more wins would make the battle to stay in League Two `wide open’, he replied:

“It is. But we have to do it and that’s the main aspect of it. We’re trying our best as we have done all season and we will do our best on Tuesday night to get that victory.”

With the clocks having gone forward on Sunday, it was actually light as the game kicked-off in front of a sparse crowd under a blue sky with a keen breeze which made the temperature cool rather than cold.

The most remarkable thing that could be said for the so-called Robins in the first half was that their all lime-green strip didn’t remind me of any species of bird I can think of. Are Canaries green? All over?

Other than that, there’s not a lot to say for the first half except that it wasn’t much of an advert for League Two football from either side.

As all Michael Flynn’s teams seem to do, there was an awful lot of getting in the referee’s ear from the visitors and occasionally, he obliged them with some poor decisions.

The ball spent a lot of time in the air; there was a lot of huffing and puffing but very little quality. Were Morecambe too hyped-up as has been suggested to me? Who knows?

Anyway, chances were at a premium for both teams. The nearest Cheltenham came to scoring was when Morecambe’s Rhys Williams nearly did it for them after 24 minutes; forcing a brilliant save from Harry Burgoyne and then nearly bundling his own goalkeeper into the net in his desperation to clear the ball as he headed towards his own goal. At the other end, Andy Dallas set-up Lee Angol from the Morecambe left for a header at the far post which beat visiting custodian Joe Day but landed on the top of the net instead of in it right at the end of the half.

And that was basically that: a snooze fest if ever there was one.

In the second half, though, it was a totally different story. Last Saturday, losing opposition Manager Ian Holloway was offered the excuse by an interviewer that the pitch at the Maz was a quagmire. He wasn’t having any of it. “It’s the same for both sides!” he raged, furious at the end of the game with his own players. “Morecambe wanted it more!” he said – and to him, that was simply not acceptable.

The same thing happened again tonight. Right from the off, it was one attack after another by the men in the red shirts.

Paul Lewis forced a good save from Day almost immediately at the cost of a corner to the Shrimps. Namesake Adam then warmed the away goalkeeper’s hands with a shot from distance with three minutes of the re-start on the clock. Then the same player struck an effort into the side netting after 56 minutes. Two minutes later, deserved official Man of the Match Callum Jones had a decent strike on goal from a free-kick which was reasonably easily saved by the visiting goalkeeper.

The Shrimps had forced a number of corners by this point in the game and virtually all the action had been in the Town half.

King Derek took off Andy Dallas – who played really well tonight – after just over an hour and replaced him with Ged Garner. Ged’s first touch of the ball was to control a long clearance from his own goalkeeper which found him bearing down on the Robins’ goal; his second was to steer it past a helpless Joe Day to put his team one goal to the good.  It had been coming.

And so it went on. Town – who had clearly been playing for a draw before falling behind – seemed to briefly wake up once they had conceded. By this, I don’t mean that they suddenly started pressing Morecambe or produced loads of chances. But they did venture over the half-way line maybe two or three times. By the end of the game, however, Harry Burgoyne hadn’t been tested by the away team even once and Town had conceded again.

This time, Ibrahim Bakare (lucky to have been only booked earlier for a really bad foul on Garner) made a complete hash of an attempted clearance. The ball looped up into the air and fell into the path of Lee Angol as he charged down the pitch. So many times this season, in tight games, Morecambe players have fluffed their lines in situation like this. But Lee didn’t. If only he had been fitter for longer this term…

It could have been worse for the visitors. With seventy-three minutes played, Williams would have scored at the same end he had almost done in the first half following an Adam Lewis free-kick and a targeted Jamie Stott header to him if the goalkeeper facing him hadn’t again stayed strong. This time, Joe Day must take the same plaudits Harry Burgoyne did during the first period of the game.

But – at the end of the night – Morecambe had turned the tables on the Robins by aping their win against us earlier in the season: two-nil. Before we move on to how this has affected our predicament at the wrong end of the EFL and what Derek Adams made of it tonight, let’s just have a quick look at what defeated Manager Michael Flynn told the media after the game. Echoing Ian Holloway’s words of last Saturday, he said this about his own players:

“They’ve had some home truths in there but ultimately they’ve let themselves down and the supporters down this evening.”

It was a full programme of League Two football this evening. The one key game all Shrimps’ supporters would have had their eyes on was Harrogate v Tranmere. Who did we want to win? Would a draw be the best outcome?

Only the end of the season will tell. Tranmere’s phenomenal run of form recently came to a shuddering halt tonight. Two-nil down at one point at the Wetherby Stadium, they battled back to three-two – and then won a penalty right at the death. But the unfortunate Josh Hawkes missed it and probably won’t be able to sleep tonight as a result.

So the Yorkshire club breathe a collective sigh of relief – not that they are safe yet. Neither is Accrington – hammered 1-4 at home in the local Lancashire derby by Fleetwood.

As for Carlisle…

By rights – and the amount of money spent – they should be leading League Two. But they seem to be on a Lemming-like plunge from League One to the National League in just two seasons. They lost yet again tonight, 2-1 this time at Chesterfield.

So, with forty games out of forty-six played, Carlisle find themselves five points adrift of us right at the bottom of the entire EFL. Tranmere are one place and just four points better off than Morecambe. Accrington remain two points ahead of them: six points ahead of ourselves.

So it is still very much all to play for. This is what Derek said after tonight’s game:

“We’ve cut the gap. That’s all we can ask for. We’ve got to win football matches. Today, we’ve done that.  I thought that the way we played, there was a lot of top performances tonight. We were all very, very good. It was a really top performance.”   

Morecambe: 1 Harry Burgoyne; 3 Adam Lewis; 4 Tom White; 6 Jamie Stott (C); 9 Hallam Hope (18 Ben Tollitt 88’); 10 Lee Angol; 14 Rhys Williams; 16 Andy Dallas (33 Ged Garner 66’); 17 Paul Lewis (24 Yann Songo’o 81’); 23 David Tutonda; (C); 28 Callum Jones (20 Callum Cooke 89’).

Subs not used:  12 Ryan Schofield; 11 Jordan Slew 19 Marcus Dackers.

Cheltenham Town: 21 Joe Day; 2 Arkell Jude-Boyd (Y); 4 Liam Kinsella; 5 Timothée Dieng; 6 Tom Bradbury (C) (23 Val Adedokun 73’); 9 Matt Taylor (16 Ethan Williams 83’); 10 George Miller (11 Ashley Hay 64’); 15 Jordan Thomas (3 Ryan Haynes 83’); 18 Ibrahim Bakare (Y); 22 Ethan Archer (14 Liam James Dulson 73’); 25 Sam Stubbs.

Subs not used: 26 Tommy Backwell; 41 Mamadou Diallo.

Ref: Richard Eley.

Att: 2, 502 (48 from Cheltenham. Safe journey back to one and all of them.)