Paul Caddis’ side will need to bounce back quickly after the narrow defeat to Gillingham in the FA Cup on Saturday. Hopefully the players will have had time to recover from a gruelling second half when Hereford went close to equalising, although that may provide players who haven’t had much game time recently a chance to impress.
Here is Simon Wright with his take on “the Divisions wealthiest club”.
That’s Brackley Town FC in case you hadn’t guessed. Their last accounts showed over £500k in the bank and an overall profit figure of £1.1 million. All this wealth never seems to help them over the line. Their Play-off record remains no promotions from six attempts. Their most recent failure, losing a Play-Off Final to Kidderminster was particularly galling, and not just fir their own supporters. They seem just as much trapped in this division as we are.
The Saints are familiar visitors to the Street and generally load at least a point into their coach boot with their dirty kit. In six previous visits, Hereford FC have won only once, a 2-1 win during COVID when no-one was there to see it. More positively, in recent games the Bulls are at least finding the net behind vintage keeper Danny Lewis. We’ve scored two in each of the last 3 encounters with them. High ad regular scoring indeed for our goal limited squad.
Even though they do have a 41-year-old goalkeeper, the Saints are much changed in personnel. Since May, Gavin Cowan is in charge. He’s the rather large ex Telford manager of course and holds a degree, an A licence and is MD of a Shropshire Sporting college which has 37 staff.
There’s the mandatory ex Bull in their ranks or actually two now. Zac Lilly and Tommy O’Sullivan are both semi-regular performers and both are slightly surprising arrivals. Lilly slightly less because of his Telford links.
Top scorer this season is Danny Newton with a impressive 8 in 14. Newton is 32, ex Boreham Wood though curiously he was with Brackley ten years earlier. He is supported by a couple of familiar names, Dan Turner who top scored for Leamington last season and Morgan Roberts, a former team mate of Alex Babos at Banbury. You may recall Roberts scoring twice in our very early League game at Banbury. That helped him get a move to Swindon days later.
Unusually we have an ex Brackley practitioner in our ranks. Adam Rooney featured in about two thirds of matches last term. Happily for him, there were four other strikers in the squad so no need to over-exert himself.
The Saints used to be renowned for the sparkling nature of their bed linen. Not so much this season with only four clean sheets and several rather unexpected defeats, although these were mainly at home. On the road, their form is certainly decent enough if not exceptional. Of their first seven away games, they’ve won 2, drawn 3 and lost to Scunthorpe and Scarborough.
Being a midweek fixture, you can stream the game, listen to the radio or much better still, be there.
Brackley Town (ticketco.events)
Your club needs you. Phew, got through the entire feature without using “after the Lord Mayor’s Show.”
Simon Wright
