January 29, 2022: Cheltenham Town 0 Wigan Athletic 0

“Any point away from home in this league is a good point. “

Leam Richardson post-match comment was fair in the context of accumulating points over a long season of 46 league games.

The draw means that Latics have now gone 19 matches without defeat in all competitions. This was their fourth consecutive game against a team in the lower reaches of the League 1 table. Three wins and a draw against Doncaster, Morecambe, Gillingham and Cheltenham have helped raise Wigan into the top two, with games in hand against all of their promotion rivals.

“It was either going to be a piece of magic or a set play, but we will certainly shake hands on the draw, take our point, and look forward to Tuesday.”

Latics’ display was lacking that magic yesterday, although they did look dangerous in set plays, with their big men up there. Good football was in short supply, with Latics content to constantly launch hopeful long balls gratefully received by the home side’s corpulent central defence. A draw was a fair result in the end.

Richardson sprung a surprise in his starting lineup, leaving out Steven Humphrys, who had not only scored in consecutive games, but had led the line with some style. He was replaced by new signing Josh Magennis, a battering-ram type of centre forward who had a thankless task in chasing those awful long balls against Cheltenham’s back line of three big central defenders.

Richardson’s style of play invariably includes a strong element of long ball. It is not an aesthetically appealing way to play, but it has produced results up to this point. His team is physically strong and tends to wear down the opposition by attrition, with late goals winning so many matches as the other team tires. However, it was not the case at Cheltenham, who held their own to the end. Tom Naylor and Graeme Shinnie in the centre of midfield are very experienced and accomplished players at this level. Both are capable of receiving the ball under pressure and playing accurate passes along the ground to the players further forward. Their talents were wasted in this game, the ball so often launched over their heads.

Let’s take a look at how fans reacted to the match through the message boards and social media. Our thanks go to the Vital Wigan – Latics Speyk Forum and Twitter for providing the media for the posts below to happen. Thanks go to all whose contributions are identified below:

Dudestalker commented:

Horrible football, no width. He may just get us promoted playing this style, but we would get destroyed in the championship. Before anyone kicks off, I’m fully aware we were top at 3pm but it’s terrible football to endure.

Zakky stated:

Everyone loves Leam but his tactics stink. I’ve said all season I hate the way we play, and we are awful to watch, and today’s display highlighted everything that’s wrong with his tactics it’s obvious we are struggling at present, but he changes nothing.

Megennis was just as isolated as Wyke was, and the result was the same, we had no idea how to break them down today and if anyone was going to win it was going to be Cheltenham. It might sound very harsh given our position, but we will have to massively improve if we are going to come out of February unscathed.

FrancosLoveChild wrote:

Think it’s a result we should not be surprised over considering we have not actually been performing well in games, especially the last few weeks. To be honest it’s been coming.

I can’t say much as I was not there, but I do think Leam got it very wrong leaving Humps out altogether and not going to a back 5 quicker.

WalgarthJohn added:

It was always going to happen. One game without scoring. Feel for Humphreys. As the lad was just starting to show some form. See what happens now before the window shuts. Missed max in the middle of the park. Keep playing him at full back and we will get more of these results.

Jeffs right summarised:

This is how we play. Its the same every week. We are the best side in the league but far from the most attractive to watch. However in Leam we trust and he will turn this around.

Hindleymon commented:

We aren’t capable of playing through them…haven’t been all season. What we are doing is getting results by hoof ball so until the wheels come off, he won’t change it.

King_deZueew06 provided an eloquent overview:

Only real positive out of today was we didn’t lose and Sunderland and Wycombe losing. But make no mistake MK are now in the mix and very dangerous as they play the best football out of everyone. Team selection, subs and tactics were quite counter intuitive today for me.

I don’t think we played that different today than we have done in many games this season but the difference was normally one of our players pulls out a moment of individual quality to find a goal to grind out a win while today it never arrived. If one of our set pieces goes in we excuse the rest of the performance as it’s a results business but I think if you keep playing well results will follow and i fear if you rarely play well results are going to become harder and harder to come by.

We’ve been talking about the same issue all season – we are rubbish at long ball. Our long ball style of play is playing to our weakness and against our strengths, it gives the opposition possession back constantly, nullifies our quality by making every game into battles for 50-50 balls and it’s not seeing us hit anything like our potential. There’s been a direct correlation with our best performances being the ones we’ve played less long ball and our worst performances being the ones we’ve played the most. It makes no sense why we keep persisting with this less effective style when we’ve seen us play teams off the park in patches playing it on the deck. I have no issue going long if we were any good at it but we aren’t and we aren’t talking tikka-taka we are talking just doing what we’ve shown we can do if we don’t always try and bypass midfield.

It’s not the players aren’t good enough, it’s not the formation, it’s not a lack of fight, effort or spirit – we have all of those attributes in abundance and those characteristics are the reason we are where we are. While we are where we are despite our style of play making it harder.

Last week in the first half against Gillingham we tried to play football and it was the best we’d looked in so long. While Gills were poor in their own right there was a concerted effort to avoid going long and it made us look so much better than normal – it was the first sign of progress or improvement in our game we’ve seen in months. But today it seemed like all of that went out of the window and it was a massive step backwards. Granted the pitch might not have been perfect for playing nice football but we made zero attempt to play football despite it being apparent long ball wasn’t working after about 20 mins.

I don’t think anyone played very well – to be fair the way we played made it near impossible for anyone to look good as we never strung enough passes together. But Magennis hasn’t played in nearly a month and didn’t look at all fit. Starting him at the expense of Humphrys who was fit, in form and full of confidence was a really poor decision and you didn’t need hindsight to see that. If Magennis so obviously needs to build up his fitness why wasnt he starting against Arsenal u21s in the PJT that would’ve been the perfect opportunity to ease him back in rather than in at the deep end. Im sorry to say Humphrys has been very poorly man managed for me – the lad was not given a proper chance and his confidence had clearly taken a big hit. But he finally gets a break – takes his chance, gets his confidence back and scores 2 in 2 and you drop him for an unfit player and bring on a centre back and an under performing winger ahead of him – it’s going to be a unnecessary hit to his confidence. I think writing off Magennis on today is really unfair, he was a 1 in 2 striker at this level last season and besides not looking fit, he was given absolutely nothing to work with. I know he’s a target man but he was on his own against 3 massive centre halves and none of the long balls were played into him with any precision or control they were just blasted as hard as they could in his general direction. Obviously you want your target man to challenge for everything and try and make the most of anything played towards him but he was fighting an up hill battle to make much out of some of those balls. Even if he did win the ball there weren’t many men running off him or ready for the knock downs.

I’m not worried because we didn’t win 1 game, I’m worried because the style of play is something we’ve seen so little evolution or improvement over the months and we don’t seem to learn or adapt from our mistakes. We’ve been playing teams that are low on confidence, in poor form and vastly weaker quality of players and we’ve been scraping by. When we’ve played teams that play more passing football we’ve come unstuck previously and we’ve got a lot of those coming up.

We are in a fabulous position, we have so much going for us – work rate, fight, fitness, spirit and often vastly superior players – but this style of play levels the playing field for the opposition and gives everyone a chance against us. It’s like us going into a boxing match with one hand tied behind our backs.

This run of fixtures coming up really worries me as I fear we’ve been getting away with so many lack lustre performances and giving away soft goals before turning it on for 30 mins at the end to save ourselves. B against teams who are going to be much more competitive we wont be able to play poorly for most of the game or give away leads without being punished.

No one is saying we need to sack anyone or buy a new team or throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a great deal we do very well as proof by our league position but we certainly need to improve our style of play if we want to keep on track for promotion and look beyond that. We are far better and more capable than hoofing it all the time, it’s just getting a much lower return out of the great amount of quality we have. If we could just play more pass and move football than long then we’d be unstoppable.