Adam Virgo – “National League title is there for the taking!”

(Picture: ShutterPress)
By Adam Virgo
WELL, my pre-season predictions for the National League aren’t coming in… just yet.
I tipped Tranmere Rovers as the team to beat. Currently they’re 15th in the table with five wins, five draws and five defeats.
Micky Mellon’s team can still turn it around. If they were conceding loads and not scoring any, that would suggest they’d lost the manager. Defensively they’re fine.
Only Wrexham have conceded less goals (eight) than them and Dover, who have both let in ten. Going forward, though, it hasn’t quite happened for them.
They’ve had a couple of big results recently – late wins against Bromley and Leyton Orient before a draw last weekend with Chester. That’s seven out of nine points and that can build momentum. They’ve got the experience to get out of this sticky patch.
Perhaps the league being so tight at this stage of the season – they’re nine points behind leaders Macclesfield – is one reason why Micky is still in a job. If someone was 20 points clear already it might be a different story. He did a great job last year and any other season they would have won the title, but Lincoln City were so strong and they got stronger.
It’s difficult to say with real confidence, but perhaps the extra two play-off spots that have been introduced this season have given clubs a bit of freedom to think, ‘We can do this!’.
Even though I’m dead against the change – it’s rewarding mediocrity in my eyes – the fact seventh place can get promoted to the Football League has transformed the whole dynamic.
Some of the part-time clubs have really stepped up this year. Just look at Chris Kinnear’s Dover Athletic. They are hardly conceding goals – if they’d had this defence last year, they’d probably have got promoted. They lost a lot of players in the summer, not least scoring sensation Ricky Miller, but Chris has once again built a solid side.
There are so many teams who could have gone either way this season – kicked on or crumbled. I’d put Dagenham & Redbridge in that category, so manager John Still deserves a lot of credit.
Paul Doswell at Sutton too; the signings he made in the summer were brilliant. That little bit of experience of Ross Lafayette and Aswad Thomas from Dover, a sprinkling of magic dust in Kenny Davis. All players with National League experience who are keeping up with the rest of them.

But at the moment there isn’t really one team that stands out above the rest.
I’ll be honest, some of the games I’ve seen this season have been pretty poor. The first half of Eastleigh versus Wrexham wasn’t great until the last 20 minutes when it sprang into action. Tranmere versus Orient was OK – but I haven’t come away from a game yet saying: “They are the team to beat.” We’re waiting for the league to really catch fire.
It’s not for the want of trying. The league has come a long way in recent years in terms of professionalism and standards. The number of players going from the National League into the Football League is big.
National League teams are losing their best performers, not to each other, but to clubs higher up.
And even lower down in the case of Salford City signing Liam Hogan and Lois Maynard or Kidderminster getting Lee Vaughan. We can’t forget all those things and say the league standard has dropped, just because August to October has only been ‘OK’ on the pitch.
There isn’t a really big spender, add in the teams that have come down from the Football League, Orient and Hartlepool, not being as strong as others in the past and the ones coming up being able to keep hold of their squad core, and it makes for a very even division.
But it does annoy me when I hear Leyton Orient saying: ‘We’ve got a brand new side.’ Well, hang on a minute, so have Dover, so have Woking… and Wrexham. You don’t hear them complaining.
The ‘new side’ thing works for a while but you can’t keep using that as an excuse. They just can’t defend at the moment. George Elokobi and Josh Coulson are out and the goals they concede are defensively poor. Steve Davis has had a lot of injuries, in fairness, and they’ve had to blood some teenagers. I know they almost went out of business, but they’ve got some decent players in their squad.
Most of them would get in the team at Macclesfield or Dover – you can’t say they’re poor players because they’re not. They just don’t seem to have a Plan B.
There’s lots of reasons why the league is so even at the moment and, come the end of the season, I think the table will look a lot different to now. I believe the final top seven will have five teams you would have picked at the start of the season.
And my prediction of Tranmere going up may still pay off!
*This article originally featured in The @NonLeaguePaper, which is available every Sunday!