Blimey, that was rough.
The opening day of a league season is supposed to bring relief. Relief that, after a period of no live football for many, our favourite club finally return to league action. For Plymouth Argyle, it was an unmitigated disaster, as Wayne Rooney’s Greens lost 4-0 away at Sheffield Wednesday. Frankly, the result flattered Argyle. Rooney’s side were totally outplayed from start to finish, and fully deserved their opening day humiliation.
You have to go back to 61 years to find a worse result for Argyle on the first day of a season – a 5-0 defeat at Middlesbrough in 1963. To put that into perspective, that’s closer in time to the maiden voyage of the Titanic than it is to the present day, an event that only narrowly takes the crown for the biggest disaster to be mentioned in the last couple of paragraphs.
Argyle will look to swiftly move on, and have the opportunity to do so with a League Cup fixture against Cheltenham Town. Although it could well be the case that this is a no-win situation for the Greens. Hosting League Two opposition, they’ll be expected to win at a canter, and any victory would be seen as par for the course. Lose, and the reaction could become dangerously toxic very quickly.
Will Argyle get the job done? Or are Cheltenham the sort of team who can deal another early blow to Rooney’s Argyle project?
Style of play
At this stage of the season, Cheltenham as a side are much more difficult to read than Sheffield Wednesday. Unlike the Owls, they changed their manager over the summer, and have a host of new additions in the side. In their season opener against Newport County, only one member of the starting 11 (midfielder Liam Kinsella) was at the club last season. That’s a staggering level of change, and makes drawing any conclusions incredibly tricky.
That being said, there has at least been some level of continuity on the formation front. Darrell Clarke lined up with three at the back and two up front at the conclusion of last season. In their 3-2 opening day win against Newport, new manager Michael Flynn did exactly the same.
Kinsella has clearly remained in favour, so I’d expect to see him lining up in midfield. On Saturday he was alongside Harrison Sohna, though at Home Park it’d be harsh not to give Luke Young, who arrived on a free from Wrexham this summer, a chance to shine against his boyhood club. Ahead of them will surely be Joel Colwill; he scored a brace against Newport, including the winner deep into stoppage time.
There are options for the front two. On Saturday Flynn opted for Ryan Bowman and Liam Dulson, and for their second goal the former assisted the latter. If they’re both fit they’ll probably start, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see either the experienced Matty Taylor or new arrival from Doncaster Rovers George Miller get the nod.
Further back, 33-year-old Scot Bennett was trusted with the captain’s armband on his debut, and will surely line up in the back three. Levi Laing and Ibrahim Bakare were the others chosen on Saturday, and I expect they will be again, but Flynn does have the option to bring in Tom Bradbury, one of the few options in the squad who was at the club last year. Owen Evans will line up in goal unless Flynn has a “cup goalkeeper” agreement with veteran new arrival Joe Day.
Whoever lines up in the two wing back positions will give us a key indication as to how Cheltenham intend to play. Sheffield Wednesday’s wide defenders did provide width going forward, but they weren’t quite as vital to the attacking system, with both wingers providing more than enough width to overpower Argyle. Cheltenham are different – lining up with two strikers and no conventional wingers means the wing backs will have to be energetic, and provide an influence at both ends of the field.
The Robins more or less have one attacking option and one defensive option on each side. On the left, Ryan Haynes would be a defensively solid choice who can still be useful going forward, whilst Jordan Thomas (who replaced Haynes from the bench on Saturday) would be an aggressive choice given he mainly lines up as a winger. On the right, Southampton loanee Lewis Payne is the defensive choice, and played the full 90 against Newport. If Flynn wants to play on the front foot, he may instead give a start to Arkell Jude-Boyd, who was actually linked with Argyle earlier in the summer.
Given Cheltenham arrive at Home Park as the underdogs, I suspect we’ll see the safe choice of Haynes and Payne. Anything else could create an interesting dynamic in the wide areas. Whatever happens, those areas will be crucial.
Strengths
I’d like to start this section off with an important note. Whilst Cheltenham were relegated last season, for much of the campaign they were a perfectly acceptable League One side.
The Robins were practically doomed to relegation from the start. They made national headlines and broke a whole host of records by failing to score in their first 11 league games. Unsurprisingly, that was enough to see the back of former gaffer Wade Elliott.
Under Clarke, there was a sharp uptick. Across his 36 matches, Cheltenham picked up 43 points, equating to 1.19 points per game. Across a whole season that’d total around 55 points, comfortably enough for survival.
Of course, this isn’t Clarke’s Cheltenham anymore (given his record, it’s no surprise he upgraded over the summer and took over at Barnsley), but it remains the case that they could easily have saved themselves in League One last term. Cheltenham aren’t a hopeless League Two team coming to Home Park to try their luck, as we saw with Sutton United in the FA Cup last season. Argyle would do well not to take them lightly.
Obviously, Flynn’s Cheltenham have only played one competitive game. It’s therefore tough to deduce any strengths on the back of it, even if it was a dramatic victory. Given the vast turnover, it’s also difficult to justify using last season’s stats as a basis. What we can do, however, is look at how Flynn’s sides have functioned in the past.
He’s most well known for taking over at Newport during the 2016/17 season – you may remember him being in the opposition dugout as Argyle secured promotion against Newport with a 6-1 win. But Flynn’s introduction was a good one overall; having taken over at a side deep in relegation trouble, Newport survived courtesy of 89th minute goal on the final day.
That already tells us several things. Flynn isn’t a “firefighter” as such, but his first role in management was to take a side that looked doomed to relegation and get them to survive. To do that, you need to have your team doing the basics correctly, you need to be a strong motivator, and you need to know how to win ugly.
Those trends have continued throughout Flynn’s managerial career. In 2018/19 he took Newport to the play-offs having scored fewer and conceded more goals than any of the top seven. In the 2019/20 season, Newport had scored just 32 goals before the season was curtailed due to the COVID outbreak – only bottom side Stevenage had scored fewer. But Stevenage were deep in relegation trouble, whilst Newport were comfortably in mid-table. Flynn’s side weren’t pretty, but they picked up points when necessary.
That’s what Argyle will face against Cheltenham. Flynn will set his side up to keep Argyle at bay – that’s why I suspect we’ll see the “safer” Haynes and Young in the wing back positions – and hope that one of their strikers (many of whom I believe are very good) can fire them to victory. It’s a plan that, whilst not fun to watch, has been successful for many teams over the years, and it’s up to Rooney to combat that threat.
Argyle’s head coach spoke at length about getting the basics right after the aberration in Sheffield. He may well get a lesson in that from his counterpart on Wednesday night.
Weaknesses
There is an obvious issue when club personnel changes so drastically from one season to the next. Introducing so many new members to a team means familiarity and gelling can be tough, particularly under new management and particularly early on in a season. I dare say we saw similar at Argyle in the opening weekend of the season, but Cheltenham take that to another level.
As I mentioned, just one of the players who lined up against Newport on Saturday was a Cheltenham player last season. In fact, the Robins have made 13 permanent signings so far this summer, and brought a further three players in on loan. It’s effectively an entirely new squad, and there’s no way a team like that can understand how it’s supposed to operate quickly. I’ve spoken at length about how a Flynn team can successfully function, but this one won’t reach its peak for a while yet.
We’ve already had an example from their game with Newport. Yes, Cheltenham won, but Flynn himself mentioned they were fortunate. They actually started brilliantly, going 2-0 up after 27 minutes, but they suddenly found themselves level at 2-2 before half time. It’s poor game management, flying in the face of what we know about Flynn’s teams, and shows they still have plenty to learn.
The process is made trickier when you consider the task of making up for the players they’ve lost. Highly-rated goalkeeper Luke Southwood had the chance to stay but moved to Bolton Wanderers. 2023-24’s top assist maker Will Ferry also rejected a new deal and moved north of the border to Dundee United. Liam Sercombe was top scorer last term by a distance, scoring 27% of his team’s league goals. He now plays for Forest Green Rovers. None of that can be easily replaced.
I will just linger on last season for a moment, and investigate some stats. And yes, I know I said the transformation in Cheltenham means these don’t really mean anything anymore, but I can’t resist. Besides, old habits, particularly bad habits, die hard, and it’s not impossible for some of those to carry over from season to season.
There were a few things that caught my eye. Their shot accuracy was particularly poor, with 27% of their shots hitting the target. That’s worse than any team Argyle faced in the Championship last season. And their passing stats were even more deficient, with their pass success rate a measly 60%. Rotherham United had the worst pass success rate in the second tier last season, and even they reached 69%.
And for a side who perhaps weren’t the most technical, Cheltenham will be disappointed that they couldn’t make up for that with physicality. Their aerial duel success was a disappointing 47%. Flynn won’t stand for that, and to meet their goals for the season they will have to win more of those duels whilst improving the technical aspects of their game, particularly in front of goal.
Maybe we’ll see a side looking to prove to their new manager that they have improved on the stats of their predecessors. Or maybe we’ll see a side who still haven’t fully gelled and will be easy for a higher-level team to play around. Rooney could certainly do with it being the latter.
Prediction
On one side we have a team that looked totally dysfunctional at the weekend, but with the better players on paper. On the other, we have a team that have a manager who knows how to make his team functional, but may have to wait a few months to reach its potential. It’s safe to say that I’m not expecting an exciting game.
In this situation I’d err on the side of better quality shining through. I’m not expecting Argyle to brush their opponents aside, but I do thing there is enough in the side to win, perhaps by the odd goal. I imagine the players coming into the side will be desperate to prove a point, and that’ll see Argyle over the line. 2-1.