Fast start please

I know it's a bit early in the season to start looking for patterns, but one habit Wrexham seem to be fallling into needs to be broken sharpish. It's not an easy thing to quantify or explain, but the facts are clear; so far this season very little seems to be happening in the first half of our matches, and that has to stop.

We've scored one goal in the first half so far this season, and that was Hedi Taboubi's free kick which was a couple of minutes before the break. If you cast your mind back to pre-season, when we were playing exciting, open football and looking great going forwards, you'll realise that we were able to be so expansive because or opponents, often from higher divisions, weren't about to come to The Racecourse and try to stop us playing.

Of course, we're much bigger fish in the context of the Conference, and teams aren't going to roll over and die. They'll bite and scratch and try to stop us playing, and not just at home. Look at what happened at Crawley. They let us play for ten minutes and we tore them apart, so they reorganised, focused on making the game ugly and scrappy, which they do very well, and we were lost.

Of course we didn't score to take advantage of that dominant spell at Crawley, and that was what did for us. If we'd managed to take the lead then, Steve Evans wouldn't have been able to make the same change and we'd probably have gone on to win the game. and that's the lesson we have to learn. We've got to start scoring in the first half: that'll force teams to come out and attack us, and then we'll have more room to attack them.

Still, there's a positive side to the drabness of our first halves. We haven't let a goal in during the first forty-five of a match yet. Now there's a habit I can live with!