AFTER an excellent run of wins which has buoyed the club, Saturday’s visit of Hereford finally saw us fail to get a game over the line. While the winning run has been fantastic, it was always going to come to an end although if I’m brutally honest, I had expected a win pre-game and with the visitors going down to ten men relatively early in the game, my expectation of the win grew.

Pre-game, the conversation in the bar centred on former players coming back. Would the curse of the returning player strike? A talismanic striker and a goalscoring midfielder; there was always the chance if Hereford scored it could well be one of the two players that we cast adrift. As it was, there really wasn’t an awful lot from either to suggest they would threaten us. Aside from an early wriggle past a couple of defenders, Reece Styche spent most of the game on the pitch doing the same thing Jordan Nicholson did from a sedentary position on the bench – watch wave after wave of Darlo attacks.

For all of the money Hereford are rumoured to be spending – after all, we have a rough idea that Styche and Nicholson don’t play for peanuts while their excellent goalkeeper Brandon Hall was whisked away from full time Kidderminster – they really didn’t look like a side swimming in wonga.

In fact, despite being ahead of us in the league, they looked decidedly average whether that was with 11 men or ten. Unfortunately, for a side that had shipped three goals in each of the last two away games including a trip to Bradford (Park Avenue), they had a determination to keep their clean sheet and to be fair to them, they defended stoutly.

From our perspective, for all the ball we had, you started to get the feeling during the second half that we could play all night and still not get the goal. Whether the midweek game against Kidderminster took something out of our legs, who knows? Sadly, we just didn’t seem to have that little bit of extra quality to open them up.

As frustrating as the afternoon was, there really wasn’t too much ground to have a grumble. With our side starting to feel their feet this season, sides will become more wary of playing us. There is a good chance more sides will turn up to Blackwell Meadows looking to sit in and take a point. The challenge for Alun Armstrong and the players will be to come up with ways to deal with that.

It is a compliment to how well we have been playing of late that a side aggressively chasing the playoffs decided to shut up shop and cling on for dear life to a point. As it was, despite throwing the kitchen sink at our guests, what was really pleasing was how we kept our concentration and discipline defensively to ensure we didn’t gift Hereford more than the point they managed to secure.

A big talking point off the pitch seems to be the situation regarding Liam Connell. I think the South Shields stopper has been excellent during his month’s loan. Not only has he done exactly what you want from your goalkeeper, but his presence has also coincided with a run of games where we have looked very solid defensively.

Our defence seems to have an assurance that wasn’t there in the opening weeks of the season. Obviously, there have been other additions to our defensive unit which have added to the solidity but having a goalkeeper like Connell behind them certainly helps. Hopefully the club can work something out with South Shields so we can keep him, but if that means having to hand over a ridiculous amount of money for a 34-year-old who is out of contract in the summer, then we’ll have to accept it won’t happen and we need to move on.