jolly the poor workman

Quoted from Northbank Mariner

Going to out this to you, could it be that Macca, who is becoming a club legend, is slightly at fault for this??...
Lll and Monkhouse spring to mind, the fact JM can't help but lump it out to the big man??...
Maybe, just maybe he needs to be told to move the ball quicker and play out through the midfield rather than resorting to route 1...just think the temptation is too much for him....

He takes the percentage option. When he was younger he used to get a lot of stick for putting the ball out, giving the ball away or giving hospital passes to the midfield with a throw or a shorter kick. Nowadays he seems to take the long option more often than not because it is less likely to cause him trouble even if it goes wrong and we lose possession from it. If it goes right - he’s a hero!

Quoted from Maringer

I don't mind the Plan A of using Hanson too much. The problem is that we just don't play it well enough. The service in to him is terrible and we don't have players around him to pick up the pieces because the midfield are deep and we're lacking in pace. I think Jolley was hoping for a Hanson/Green partnership to really click but it has been the opposite as they are rarely close enough to each other to link up.

The service was decent in August I thought, when both Hendrie and Hewitt were playing. If you look at Hanson's record too, he always seems do well in August and then have a dip like this. Another thing worth mentioning as well is that if you speak to any Mansfield or Lincoln they all seem to agree Green is way better in a two up front and not a three.

Quoted from TheRonRaffertyFanClub

He takes the percentage option. When he was younger he used to get a lot of stick for putting the ball out, giving the ball away or giving hospital passes to the midfield with a throw or a shorter kick. Nowadays he seems to take the long option more often than not because it is less likely to cause him trouble even if it goes wrong and we lose possession from it. If it goes right - he’s a hero!

Maybe he's obeying orders

Quoted from golfer

Maybe he's obeying orders

Well, as Captain he should take the bull by the horns and ignore them if he can see lumping it up just ain't working, that's his role!!

The other teams have figured out how to nullify out threat. We need to evolve.

Original post in this thread from a serial moaner pretty embarrassing, especially the misspelling of our manager’s name.

Anyway, which manager was it who recently said ‘Grimsby have a bit of everything’? That’s good. We just need to be smarter at deploying it. The glaring issue for me, is if our Plan A revolves around crosses to Hanson, then we surely must be playing with some width and working on delivery and set pieces. For me the team is often not  set up to prioritise this. One natural attacking wide player in the squad looks like a management oversight to me. It seems to be fairly evident after this number of games that we are probably going to be a middling sort of team. Better than being strugglers but I think we could be making much better use off what we’ve got at times.

My main gripe with Jolley is it takes him so long to learn from mistakes. How many times does he play players in positions they aren't suited to before he stops doing it? Even when it's blindingly obvious to most of us. I also think he's guilty of massively over-complicating matches. If you go away to an unbeaten, top of the table team and beat them 3-1 those tactics are just because you prepared for that game. Bearing in mind we are the only team to beat Exeter so far this season, it is likely that those tactics will cause most teams some problems. Perhaps not as many problems as it caused Exeter, but problems none the less. But he seems to want to set up differently for every game and base all his tactics on what they might do, not what will help us. When he does this, it completely backfires. Although to be honest, I can't even see what the thinking was behind the tactics yesterday. Suffice to say, if you struggle to do anything against the worst team in the FL then you have got it pretty spectacularly wrong.

His squad building has again left a lot to be desired. We have a player in Hanson who would thrive off good deliveries from high up the pitch yet we have only one out and out recognised player winger in the squad. I don't think we would necessarily have to ditch 4-3-3 to get the best out of Hanson but shoe-horning Green out wide plus having no pace in the forward line limits the amount of times you can create the space out wide to cross in. Having said that, one of the players who would seem more naturally suited to this sort of game, Vernam, has seemingly been frozen out. He's not a winger as such but he's fairly quick and would be a more natural choice than Green to play that role. He's also one of a very few players in the squad with the ability to go past his man. In the first half yesterday we didn't even attempt to dribble past anyone, let alone do it successfully. That is shocking against a side that only 5 points to their name a quarter of the way through the season.

Personally I would go back to a similar set up to what worked well around Christmas last year, playing a 4-2-3-1. The defence is fairly solid but now Gibson has found form he has to be the starting left back, another inexplicable and inexcusable tinkering. In front of the defence I'd have Hess with probably Robson but if you wanted Robson higher up the pitch then Clifton. Hanson as the forward and focal point but try to use his feet rather than aimless hoofs to him. Then just behind Hanson I'd have Ogbu or Cook who are instructed to get in and around Hanson for lay offs or beyond him if we long (which is sometimes an option, just not the way we do it as a default). On the right Wright picks himself when fit and on the left I'd have Ogbu, Rose or Vernam. This would give us a bit more pace in the starting eleven but if we're getting overrun it could turn in to a more compact 4-5-1 or a 4-4-2 quite easily but would still have enough pace to make us dangerous on the counter.

                  Macca
Hewitt  Waterfall  Pollock  Gibson
             Hess     Robson
Wright        Ogbu             Rose
                Hanson
Would leave you with Vernam, Green and Cook as players on the bench who could come on and potentially change things. Let's mix our play up, ditch the aimless hoofs and try to have some sort of consistent approach rather than worrying so much about the opposition. Tweak things to counter them by all means but not wholesale changes every couple of weeks.

Yep Jolley loves to try and counter teams it seems rather than try and impose ourselves on the opposition which is a shame. We are blessed with some decent players now and I think it’s time he decided what his best 11 is and stuck with it for a bit.
There aren’t many better full backs in the division than Hendrie and it’s time to stop messing him about. He should be number one right back. Gibson on the left. Centre half is a difficult one and I think you could make a good argument for all of them.
Hess is probably first name on the team sheet and rightly so. He needs at least one partner that can pick a pass so Robson needs to be in there. Clifton has played midfield when we have been on our best runs over the last couple of years (and worst). He takes third spot.
Front three has to be Wright, Hanson and one other. As mentioned by someone previously, the squad assembly isn’t the best again so it has to be a square ish peg on the left. So one of Rose, Green, Ogbu or Vernam. Vernam deserves a go surely now. At one point he was the only shining light and now he barely gets any opportunities.
A Ben Pringle or such like on loan is a must ASAP.

As for Jolley changing things unecessarily, well with an injury to Wright last week, change was forced on him. As we don't have a like-for-like replacement we had to make other changes to the team.   Sometimes I just think footballers are a bit slow mentally. You don't need to be an out and out winger to know that when you have the ball on the flank and any opposition players are several yards away from you, you move forward, not look to pass it sideways or back.

Quoted from KingstonMariner

As for Jolley changing things unecessarily, well with an injury to Wright last week, change was forced on him. As we don't have a like-for-like replacement we had to make other changes to the team.   Sometimes I just think footballers are a bit slow mentally. You don't need to be an out and out winger to know that when you have the ball on the flank and any opposition players are several yards away from you, you move forward, not look to pass it sideways or back.

Pollock and Rose were dropped from the team v Exeter to accommodate Hanson and Davis. Vernam not even on the bench when he is the most natural replacement for Wright.

This week, Gibson, who has barely put a foot wrong, dropped so that we can accommodate an out of form right back and Green, not Rose, Ogbu or Vernam starts instead of Wright.

We, including the manager, all talk about playing counter attacking football and yet we pick our slowest striker. Makes no sense to me.