Cardiff strike late, Cov beat Boro, Watford sting Wednesday + FA Cup R1 highlights
4 November 2024 | Weekend Notes brings you the biggest stories, stats and insights from the EFL weekend
● BIG STORIES ● CHEAT SHEET ● 5IVELIGHTS ● THE VIEW FROM ● FANTASY FOOTBALL ● WATCHING BRIEF ●
Remember, remember…
You have to feel sorry for today’s date. It’s been relegated to the sidelines of British history by a spot of high treason and the subsequent ‘drawing backwards’ of a few disgruntled blokes whose plotting in the Duck and Drake pub didn’t quite go to plan, to put it mildly (or bitterly, depending on their tipple). The punishment was much more painful than it sounds.
Any road. Today is 4 November and we are celebrating the pop-crackle of an overlooked and underappreciated part of the football calendar: the FA Cup First Round. Of course, the Championship was still on schedule and we aren’t skipping our normal league duties – behold, an 8-goal cracker, five away wins and possibly the worst performance we can remember seeing in the second tier…
🚨 Big Stories
A selection of decisive moments from across the EFL.
🥉 Coventrio — Middlesbrough 0-3 Coventry — Going toe-to-toe with Boro is no easy task, although it was a task made easier when Hayden Hackney went toe-to-shin twice in the first half for two yellows and a red. Coventry had already had two goals ruled out for offside by that point and they made relatively light work of Boro with a goal before the break and another two after it. Michael Carrick’s side have now been trailing in games for longer than they’ve led. Coventry are giving off ‘they’re back’ vibes, but let’s assess that next week after Derby (H) and Sunderland (A).
🔙 Amongst the backness — Luton 1-1 West Brom — Another team who may or may not be back are Luton: since losing to Sheffield United, their ‘being back’ has coincided with one win, two losses and now a draw. It was harsh on Luton when Albion conjured a goal from a Josh Maja backheel: the Hatters were the better team on the night, deserved their equaliser, might’ve won it with a Daiki Hashioka header and almost lost it to a Devante Cole bicycle. It finished all square. Luton’s ‘backness’ will be tested by a November fixture list that includes visits to Middlesbrough, Leeds and Norwich, while West Brom are winless in seven, have scored two in their last six, and have drawn five games in a row for the first time since the ’90s.
🍽️ Hornets ate in 8 — Sheffield Wednesday 2-6 Watford — An aberration, a deserved thrashing, or something in between? Watford put poor away form behind them with an eyebrow-raising scoreline at Hillsborough. Wednesday arguably shaded the first half and should’ve done better with their early chances, but having come out for the second half at 1-1, they underwent a feta-like crumbling. The five goals they conceded within 40 minutes included two penalties, while Vakoun Bayo took his season’s tally from 1 to 5. Serious bounceback is required with 3 games in 8 days, including the Sheffield derby next Sunday.
🎶 (Blue)Birdhouse in your soul — Blues beat Canaries in added time with a late hit, who watches over you? The footballing gods, perhaps. Cardiff rode their luck at times, and a weakened Norwich side spurned good chances, but a late, late rally made it a fourth home win on the spin for Omer Riza’s rejuvenated Bluebirds, who’ve taken 14 points from 7 games since sacking Erol Bulut. Only Leeds have picked up more in that time. The kids on the street are saying it: “Omer’s coming.”
👎 Ouch — Leeds 3-0 Plymouth — Check out The View From…
🏆 Cup Stories
Because the FA Cup is no mug, Huw’s gone around the grounds
🌺 It’s Poppies’ season — Northampton 1-2(aet) Kettering — This was embarrassing for Northampton, who picked a strong side to welcome their non-league neighbours (and did have a goal wrongly disallowed at 0-0), but focus belongs to the Poppies. Four divisions separate the clubs, though Kettering did play three ex-Premier League strikers, with (in)famous former ne’er-do-well Nile Ranger scoring the winner before being replaced by Marvin Sordell – the social activist and London 2012 Olympian who ended a five-year retirement to join the club – while Gary Hooper also appeared off the bench. Yet the real star was midfielder Devon Kelly-Evans, driving his team to a famous upset. James Acaster will be pleased.
👌 Peak FA Cup — Tamworth 1-0 Huddersfield — Last year’s National League North champions beat League One’s high-flying Huddersfield in an FA Cup upset so packed with clichés, it could’ve been written by AI. If having a veteran long-throw specialist effectively score from one is a little on-the-nose, his name being Tom Tonks is just lazy scriptwriting. Yet the joy was very real as BBC cameras cut to a child waving his tinfoil FA Cup – apt, as crowd noise throughout the match suggested Tamworth’s home support has an average age of 9. This was a tale of two keepers, one having the best of times and one having the worst of times: Jaz Singh, who’d had to leave his job as a building surveyor an hour early, made several big saves either side of Huddersfield’s Chris Maxwell punching a long throw into his own net instead of letting it go straight in for a goal kick. Football laws are weird.
👊 Ammies hit Salop where it Hurst — Salford 2-1 Shrewsbury — Paul Hurst’s second Shrews stint ended with a sack-inducing defeat to Salford. Poor league form is the real driver, because Shrewsbury are 23rd in League One with 8 points from 14 games, but they’re also out of all three cup competitions already: no saving grace to be had there. So, Hurst is reluctantly cast adrift (and it did seem reluctant), and standing on a similarly shaky raft is Nigel Adkins, whose Tranmere side lost 2-1 at home to National League Oldham with, inevitably, Tranmere legend James Norwood scoring for their opponents. Awkward.
🪫 Evatt, Evans have never felt so low — League Two Salford beating League One Shrewsbury was one of three ‘intra-EFL’ shocks. Walsall stunned Bolton with a stoppage-time winner from in-form Jamie Jellis, meaning Ian Evatt has fallen at the first hurdle in four of his five FA Cup campaigns at Bolton. The general air of misery around Rotherham was intensified by a 3-1 home defeat to Cheltenham in front of a low crowd who felt even lower by the end, judging by the boos directed towards Steve Evans. Meanwhile, Crewe and Grimsby both lost 1-0 to non-league visitors, namely Dagenham & Redbridge and Wealdstone (that’s two teams, not three).
💥 Goals! Goals! And more goals! — Exeter 5-3 Barnet, Rochdale 3-4 Bromley, Southend 3-4(aet) Charlton, Newport 2-4 Peterborough — The NTT20 Betting Show predicted Newport v Posh and Exeter v Barnet to each feature at least 6 goals, which the bookies gave a 1.5% probability of happening. It happened. The traditional First Round free-for-all gave us 3.2 goals per game and just a single 0-0 across 39 matches, in the non-league clash between Brackley and Braintree (by way of apology to the EFL, Hednesford and Gainsborough drew 4-4). And, aside from Notts County’s 5-1 thumping of Alfreton, each goalfest was a thriller. Newport led Posh 2-0 after 7 minutes and were level going into the 89th before Ricky-Jade Jones struck twice; Rochdale were ahead after 90 but behind after 92; Exeter v Barnet was still 3-3 deep into injury time; and Charlton conceded an equaliser in second-half stoppage time, then scored a winner in extra-time stoppage time. Scenes, as they say.
👽 ET → Go home — So, how do we think the first round of no First Round replays went? We can’t say definitively whether playing extra time helped the favourites more than the underdogs, because few underdogs win their replays anyway (just 1 of 14 in the past two seasons). But 8 of the 10 higher-tier teams who were held by their supposed inferiors did end up winning in ET or on penalties, while Weston-super-Mare and Guiseley lost out on semi-lucrative home replays and fans of Maidenhead, Boreham Wood and Southend were denied trips to league grounds. The big heartbreaker for non-league stans was Maidenhead conceding a 95th-minute equaliser and losing in extra time to third-tier behemoths Crawley. BOOO.
📊 Monday Morning Cheat Sheet
From the WhatsApp group to the watercooler: stats to keep you ahead of the game.
🪄 The Magic Number — Famously, 2 points per game is the meter reading you want, and so far three Championship teams are hitting that: Sunderland (2.23), Sheffield United (2.08) and Leeds (2.00). But three into two will not go…
🚦 No Sainz of Stopping — Another 5ivelights-worthy strike from Borja Sainz puts the Norwich striker on 11 goals for the season – nobody in any of the top four divisions has scored more.
🟨 Hackney Marches — Middlesbrough’s Hayden Hackney has picked up 5 yellow cards in his last 7 games, all of which have come in the first half of those matches. Two of those saw him pick up a red against Coventry.
🎯 Where’s the target? — Blackburn’s healthy goals tally at this stage is weighted towards an opening 5 games where they scored 12 goals. Since then they’ve scored 4 in 8. On Saturday, they failed to register a shot on target for the first time in two years.
👿 Hullish — Nine of Hull’s last 14 home league games have ended in a draw (W2 L3), and after the latest, an irked Tim Walter sniped at fans before telling a local reporter, “I want to talk about the game, I want to talk about the game, let’s talk about the game”… we hear you Tim: it was a draw.
🏆 All-timers — With a 9 and 2 and a 2 and a… Kettering Town have, over the weekend, grown their lead at the top of the FA Cup all-time top scorers chart, with 922 goals.
⏱️ Who’s timing? — Well, we are, and it turns out that Sheffield United have spent more than 54% of their minutes this season leading games, the longest duration in the Championship. Sunderland are second on 48%; Leeds, third on 37%.
🎦 5ivelights
In no particular order, a collection of our favourite goals or clips from across the 72.
Borda Sainz? You can’t be; here’s another banger.
Dan James’ Halloween costume was PES 6 Adriano
This FM 05 lob was Vakoun Bayo’s hattrick goal.
Exeter’s fourth: why shoot when you can tackle it in?
And in a market town in Buckinghamshire, one man has burnt the Wyc at both ends, singing a song, from Frozen, at a football match, in the FA Cup R1.
The View From…
I don’t want to be mean. But even allowing for the important caveats that there are two teams in any football match and Leeds (A) will be the toughest fixture they play this season, was this from Plymouth Argyle a contender for the worst Championship performance since Ali said, “Welcome to the first ever episode of Not The Top 20”?
It’s not just the shot count, nor the possession split, as ugly as those look. No, it’s the total inability to do the basics; to compete in any meaningful way at all.
More than half of attempted tackles missed. A pass success rate of 50% in the first half — akin to booting a ball into the air between two people and shouting, “Heads!” — before Leeds grew bored and let Argyle’s players string a couple of passes together in the second. Zero corners. Zero offsides, even. And yes, zero shots: not a single attempt to test the goalkeeper from anywhere at all, for only the second time in the Championship since Opta began collecting such data a decade ago (Millwall were the first, and at least they drew 0-0). All this, and so much less, despite having trailed for an hour. Hell, at least a yellow card might’ve given the travelling fans some sense that you plan to show a leg.
Plymouth’s chances of avoiding relegation were always going to rely on their home form, when it was responsible for 35 of their 51 points last season, but those other 16 are not insignificant. You can prioritise those mesmerising Home Park vibes all you like, but you can’t reduce a 46-match season to 23. At the moment, the plan seems to be reminiscent of Mark Hughes’ QPR in the 2011/12 Premier League, who survived by ending the season LWLWLWLWLWL – all of the Ws at home and all of the Ls away. To be fair, that did work.
Again, it seems harsh to say this after a 3-0 defeat at Elland Road of all places, but Argyle have been comprehensively outplayed in every single match on the road. Sometimes it’s a red card, sometimes it’s two red cards, and sometimes – as was the case here – it’s an unexpected starting XI that looked unsure of itself. At least centre-back Kornel Szucs knew his position: in goal, apparently.
It all adds up to seven games and one single point, picked up fortuitously at QPR, who are one of two teams below Plymouth in the table. Total xG for: 2.8. xG against: 16.1. One goal scored. Sixteen conceded.
Maybe that’s subconsciously taking its toll. I’ll never accuse a team of deliberately not trying (unless given indisputable evidence, of course) but it was hard to discern a huge amount of intent from Argyle last weekend – only limp nothingness throughout. To use a boxing metaphor, it’s not so much that Wayne Rooney’s side couldn’t lay a glove on Leeds but that they threw in the towel after Round One. The moment Leeds breached the visitors’ defensive back nine, it was game over. Take the L and think about that home fixture in three days’ time.
There has to be more than this. Some of Plymouth’s travelling fans must have been fuming. I know I am.
🏆 Fantasy Football
Go head-to-head against team NTT20 in our EFL Fantasy Football league
Go on, Matt! Despite one player (Alfie Doughty) not getting any minutes, we moved from bottom-half obscurity to bottom-half mediocrity. Top-half mediocrity is next on the agenda, and with a 58-point haul from this gameweek so far, who’s to say we won’t one day soon achieve top-half alacrity?
Some great work by our top performers. Kudos to Mr Browne's Boys for topping the table at this early stage, and cap doff to Hey Jobe for picking up the most points so far this gameweek.
📺 Watching Brief
Upcoming live EFL games
Wednesday 6 November 2024
20:00 Preston vs Sunderland, Blackburn, vs Stoke, Coventry vs Derby, Millwall vs Leeds, Luton vs Cardiff
20:00 Luton vs West Brom
Thursday 7 November 2024
20:00 West Brom vs Burnley
Friday 8 November 2024
20:00 Watford vs Oxford
Saturday 9 November 2024
12:30 Cardiff vs Blackburn, Middlesbrough vs Luton, Stoke vs Millwall, Burton vs Shrewsbury, Wrexham vs Mansfield, Harrogate vs Morecambe & Colchester vs Salford
Sunday 10 November 2024
12:00 Sheffield United vs Sheffield Wednesday