ENTERPRISE NATIONAL LEAGUE. SATURDAY, 6th DECEMBER 2025.

Defending the Indefensible…

Something very unusual happened this afternoon at the Mazuma Mobile Stadium – a team Morecambe Football Club has actually beaten in a competitive game this season visited us. Boston United arrived in eighteenth place in the National League; four points ahead of the Shrimps as we remain in our accustomed place in the table this season: the relegation zone. Morecambe were in twenty-second position before kick-off.

During late October, the Shrimps flattered to deceive that they were turning some sort of corner when they swept the Pilgrims aside on their own patch by four goals to nil. But it was a false dawn: since then, Ashvir Singh Johal’s team has fallen back into a familiar pattern: disjointed performances during which they have continued to ship loads of goals. These have too often come about because of individual mistakes such as the one that handed the game on a plate to Braintree Town last Saturday as goalkeeper Jamal Blackman passed straight to an opposing forward and stood, helpless, as the ball was walloped past him as he was stranded in No Man’s Land outside his area.

Morecambe have lost two of their last six league games and won only one of them. Boston have lost even more – four – but also only won one. Morecambe played United countless times in the old Northern Premier League beginning as long ago as 1969. It was in this competition that the two clubs met for the first time.  They also played each other in the old Football Conference in the early 2000s (Boston won 2-1 at home during 2001 and Morecambe drew with them at Christie Park 0-0 a year later, for instance) but most of these results are seemingly lost in the mists of time.

When the Shrimps defied all odds with a 0-4 win in Lincolnshire just over a month ago, it seemed that the Morecambe Manager’s predictions that his team would click and start beating everyone were coming true. But the victory, very sadly, turns out to have been an aberration. Ash assured us all that the end of October was the precise time that Morecambe would start charging up the National League. It hasn’t happened, though. If anything, his team looks even more disjointed and unbalanced now than they did when he first promised this. He persists in getting players who clearly either don’t understand the system – or aren’t sufficiently skilful to implement it – to play out from the back. But week after week, they try to and fail – as they did for the umpteenth time yet again last Saturday: and lost the game as a direct result.

I’ve stopped listening to Mr Johal’s predictable and tame broadcasts on the club’s website. But the post-match interviews he has given in recent times betray an increasingly delusional outlook on behalf of our Manager. For instance, in a game where his shell-shocked players had conceded four goals in the opening twelve minutes at home against Gateshead, he told us afterwards:

“The first twelve minutes and the rest of the game were two completely different games. We started very badly – but after that we were ok.”

I wrote after this:

Maybe someone needs to explain to him that football matches last for ninety minutes, not seventy-eight. It’s easy enough to say `that can never happen again’ but his team have now conceded five goals in both of their last two games and I would have expected him to explain at least what he intends to do to avoid more such humiliations in the future. But he didn’t. Instead, the Manager insisted that his players `give their all’ – which is alarming in itself because that suggests they have nothing left to give – and again asked for patience with his squad, repeating the claim he has made regularly recently that by the end of October, things will totally turn around. Let’s hope he’s right – but, quite brutally – the signs are not encouraging. And if he turns out to be wrong – what then?…

What then?: more of the same as things have turned-out. Against Yeovil – a 0-0 home draw where Jamal Blackman made a phenomenal penalty save to preserve a precious point – he said: “I thought for the first seventy-five minutes, we looked pretty solid. We could have scored in the first half: a couple of chances and that opens the game up.” But they didn’t score and the game wasn’t opened-up – and what about the other fifteen minutes anyway? Remember, Ash: football matches last for ninety minutes…

Last Saturday, he came out with this little gem after the defeat against Braintree, in which he had effectively played the entire game without a Centre Forward:

“We had maybe six or seven clear-cut chances. I’m disappointed we didn’t score those: we score two of those seven chances; one of those seven chances; three of those seven chances and it’s a completely different game.”

But the harsh reality is that Morecambe never seriously looked like scoring against a really poor side despite a golden opportunity which Harrison Panayiotou fluffed – almost predictably. One of the excuses Ash used to use about his mis-firing team is that, without a pre-season, they weren’t physically fit. This was indisputably true. So surely addressing this situation would be a priority for any Manager, wouldn’t it? But before the game last Saturday, he told us this in one of his rare interviews by media not put-up by the club:

“It’s been a really positive week. You don’t really train physically; it’s more psychological; it’s more mental; it’s more positioning; it’s more thought process. That’s all we’re focused on.”

You don’t have to a Conditioning Coach to see that some of our players still aren’t fully physically fit. (Looking at a couple of them at least, you really do wonder `Who ate all the pies?’) Nobody can play football effectively if they aren’t able to compete with opposition players who are. So why aren’t Ash and his team working on this as a priority?

And as for the psycho-babble he comes out with about `thought processes’; `mental attitude’, the actual performance of his players – where a lack of concentration has been a constant problem this season – betrays that their psychological state is no better than their physical one. To tell us `That’s all we’re focused on’ only to have his goalkeeper immediately prove that his focus at least is somewhere else altogether merely serves to underline the huge gap between what Mr Johal insists is going-on behind the scenes and what actually happens on the pitch. One of the few successes of this season – Jake Cain – directly contradicted his Manager months ago by admitting that the players’ heads dropped when they went behind and that at least he thought `here we go again!’

He’s not alone. As a fan, I have lost the optimism I once had that so-called `Ashball’ was a gamble which would finally pay dividends. It obviously isn’t doing – and I can’t see any reason to believe that this will change in the foreseeable future.

The nature of the Panjab Warriors’ Project at our club is that a key part of it involves conspicuous success by members of the Sikh community. Developments this week off the field have really not helped in that regard (see the following for details:)

Strange sense of Deja Vu…

Despite this, Mr Singh Johal’s future seems to be more secure than probably any of his contemporaries in the English game. But at the moment, his performance – very sadly for everyone concerned with Morecambe Football Club – is conspicuously un-successful. This is in nobody’s interests. Next week, we will reach precisely half way through the season.

Everyone knows the stark truth about British football leagues: clubs that are bottom of them at Xmas tend to be relegated at the end of the season. So either a really spectacular improvement in form or some sort of change in the Managerial situation at the Maz becomes ever more imperative.  If we keep on playing the way we do, we will keep on losing and we will go down – it’s as simple and brutal as that. The Board need to take note of this and act – now, before it’s too late. They showed remarkable alacrity with the speed with which they publicly totally disowned yesterday a man who was Director of Communications at the club just hours before they did this. Let’s hope they are as quick to realise that the current `Ashball’ project is failing – and take similarly decisive action to redeem it.

There’s no point in repeating what Ashvir Singh Johal said about his hopes for the game before the early kick-off: his Broken Record never changes. I’ve also been unable to find any pre-match comment by opposition Manager Graham Coughlan on the Boston website or their social media feeds. But the team that lined-up against Morecambe early this afternoon was noticeably different to the one that lost so badly at home only a few weeks ago against the Shrimps. No doubt both they and their Manager would be looking for revenge…

It’s been so wet in north Lancashire for the last 24 hours or so that I was looking for signs of Noah and his Ark on the Lakeland Hills across Morecambe Bay on the way to the game. But if Noah was there, he would be hidden under a bank of cloud as it rolled towards the town across the choppy grey water, bringing yet more rain with it.  

It must have been a nightmare journey for today’s visitors from literally the other side of the country.

One of the few positive things to say about today’s debacle was that the groundstaff did an excellent job before the match: the surface looked really good and didn’t cut-up particularly badly.

Perhaps as a nod towards calamities yet to come, Morecambe played in an all-black strip this afternoon. Weirdly, the men in red were the opposition: United wore white shirts with red shorts and socks.

In his wisdom, Ash had decided to play a winger who can’t head the ball – Ben Tollitt – as his Centre Forward in today’s early kick-off and shook-up his defence in the absence of Skipper Yann Songo’o. Lewis Payne was re-introduced at Right Back; Ludwig Francillette moved to the middle at the back with Mo Sangare to his left and Maldini Kacurri (whose surname I have been spelling incorrectly all season, for which I apologise to him) to the right of centre.

It didn’t work. Long before the game was up, Morecambe were a rabble; shapeless; aimless and literally hopeless. Boston was the better side virtually right from the start and took the game to the hosts from the first whistle to the last.

Large sections of the home crows started chanting “We want Ashvir out!” after the second away goal – those that hadn’t already made a mass exodus, that is. This chorus grew ever louder and more vociferous as the game grew older. Derision met the announcement of Morecambe’s Man of the Match – it was Emmerson Sutton for the record – and visiting goalkeeper Rhys Lovett had little to do and just one simple save to make all game. The team was booed off the field at half time and at the end.

Not long had been played when Kalcurri made a wild back-pass to his goalkeeper, who made a panic-stricken hoof at the ball to clear it anywhere away from his goal-line. Shortly after this, Captain Miguel Azeez was lucky to get away with two equally blind clearances in his own penalty area which by sheer luck didn’t fall to United players. Then – after the first goal, the goalkeeper found himself stuck out of his goal area with no Morecambe team-mate making a run or even an angle into which he could play the ball. You could see – in moments like this – that the men in the black strip simply didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing.

The stricken Manager – cutting an increasingly forlorn figure as he stood alone in the rain on the touchline – proved yet again that he hasn’t a clue what to do when he inexplicably sent on two forwards – Harrison Panayiotou and Rolando Aarons – with just two minutes of the game to go and with the Shrimps nil-three in arrears. Why? What’s the point? The game was lost after the first goal, over an hour previously. These two clowns wouldn’t make any difference if they were in from the start anyway and we played with thirteen men: `Harry’ dived when he was yet again too slow to reach a through ball and should have been booked for it. Rolando touched the ball once: giving it away just outside his own penalty area. Par for the course for both of them.

For the record, Boston scored their first goal in the twenty-fourth minute. They attacked purposefully down their left; Skipper Greg Sloggett combined well with Matty Carson, who fired-in a lovely cross which Lennell John-Lewis steered beautifully to the left of Blackman with a perfect flick. In the build-up, Kalcurri saw John-Lewis getting away and pointed at him for one of his team-mates to pick up but the United forward’s electric acceleration into the home penalty area got him in front of Mo Sangare, who might just as well not have been there.

Ten minutes later, the Pilgrims were two-up. John-Lewis brilliantly controlled a long clearance from his own goalkeeper and played a perfect ball right through the centre of the Shrimps’ rearguard and Dylan Hill showed more determination than the four defenders converging on him to outpace them and strike the ball home.

Lennell John-Lewis then scored again; taking a shot in the forty-second minute which hit a home defender and was deflected – almost in slow motion – past a helpless goalkeeper. It was a lucky goal – but if you don’t shoot; you don’t score – and John-Lewis did.

So it was 0-3 at half time but the game had been lost since the first goal in all truth.

The second half was a waste of everyone’s time. Boston played the ball around at will but clearly didn’t want to risk injury or expend too much energy in running-up the cricket score you feel they could have if they really tried.

I started to run out of words ages ago to try and describe how predictable; pedestrian and simply poor Ashvir Singh Johal’s team is. Today was an embarrassment, with the certainty of plenty more to come. He needs to go.

This latest fiasco saw Morecambe still in twenty-second place in the National League once all the other fixtures were completed. But neither Gateshead – one place above us nor Truro – right at the bottom – played today and both now have a game in hand over us. Despite this, the Shrimps are still in touch with other strugglers in the Division. With a Manager who knows what they are doing, Morecambe could still escape the inevitable. But not with Ashvir Singh Johal: he stubbornly plays the same old way every week with the same old outcome more often than not: we lose. He will take us down.

I’ve started to take more interest in what the Manager says at the end of games to attempt to defend the indefensible than I do in the match itself. (For me at least, it’s just a question of how badly we are going to lose, these days.) Is he ever going to face reality and admit that he simply can’t do the job?

Seemingly not as he repeated the same old Mantra we’ve been hearing for months now. He told us – not for the first time – that his team needed to start a lot better; `give their all’; be `switched-on’ from the start of games – and create more chances. He said nothing about his set-up today and why it didn’t work. Nor did he even mention the glaring absence of a central striker in the last few games or how his men could score more goals without one.  He said nothing about changing his training regime or trying tactics other than the ones which have already proved to be a failure. As far as the latest performance is concerned, he merely said it was:

“Really frustrating. They didn’t have to work for many of their goals: we gave them all three goals. I think we need to firstly work-out what the issues were today, which we know now. We saw probably a lack of desire defensively and a little bit collectively from the group. That’s what we need to address this week because we’ve got another tough game on Saturday. That’s something we’ve got to put right.  We can’t take it for granted that we’re going to defend well.”

Morecambe:  40 Jamal Blackman; 2 Lewis Payne; 5 Maldini Kacurri; 6 Ludwig Francillette; 8 Miguel Azeez(C) (Y) (12 Rolando Aarons 88’); 10 Jake Cain (17 Paul Lewis 56’); 18 Ben Tollitt; 20 Mo Sangare (Y); 28 Emmerson Sutton (9 Harrison Panayiotou 88’); 32 George Thomas; 36 Jack Nolan.

Subs not used: 1 Archie Mair; 14 Alie Sesay; 19 Ma’Kel Bogle-Campbell; 29 Elijah Dixon-Bonner.

Boston United:  1 Rhys Lovett; 6 Greg Sloggett (C) (Y); 8 Dylan Hill; 10 Frankie Maguire (11 Kieren Donnelly 85’); 14 Lennell John-Lewis  (16 Jordy Hiwula-Mayifuila 75’); 15 Matty Carson (Alex Lankshear 85’); 19 Jordan Richards; 23 Adam Crowther; 24 Ken Aboh (4 Connor Teale 80’); 26 Oisin Gallagher; 40 Marcel Lavinier.

Subs not used: 44 Killian Barratt;2 Benjamin Grist; 18 Tommy Fogarty.

Ref: William Davis.Att: 2,409 (152 from Boston.)