After a very strange season, it was time to reassess our squad. Everyone was on the chopping block and no position was safe. Zach Dronfield, our star defensive midfielder? He would have to fight for the starting role against Lucas Defise who was poached on our way across London from Dulwich Hamlet. Defise was my revenge for the Hamlet taking Derbyshire my first days at Kingstonian.
Transfers
In addition to Defise, I took three players from Ipswich Town, who failed to advance in the League One playoffs last season and apparently led to an exodus of players. The Ipswich refugees: strikers Ben Morris and Tyreece Simpson, and right wing back Dylan Ruffles. Ruffles is the most exciting of the three, with crossing and dribbling over 10, good mental attributes, and the acceleration/pace needed to generate offense and get back on defense. On the other side, we added left fullback Loic Hernandez – a more defensive-minded player that I’ll have to hope has enough sense to pass the ball up the pitch every once and a while.
Liam Shaw joins the central midfield, Ciaren Jones will challenge the Arsenal boys for a central defender role, and yet another striker, Aaron Pressley joins the force. Yes, I’m serious about finding an attacker with some consistency.
Goal Review
Let’s recap my goals:
- Get a permanent home grounds. Moved to a bigger stadium but still renting.
- Raise attendance. Promotion will help but the stadium two hours away from our fans hurts. The previous season saw attendance stagnate at an average of 422.
- Play attacking football. We went with a double DM system because of our poor defense; we are pressing a lot, though, which should generate more offense.
- Win the FA Trophy. We have a better chance now that we’re in the National League.
- Win a league title. We were close in season one but failed last season when I really thought we had the team to do it. We’ll have to try again on our way up the pyramid.
- Defeat and surpass AFC Wimbledon. We’ll meet them one day!
Season Results
A higher division, better competition, and a lot of new faces – let’s see how Kingstonian did!
Not the greatest start, but after a gutty draw against Bromley, Pressley scored a 91st minute winner against Ebbsfleet United and we started to roll. The Ebbsfleet victory started a run of 7 wins in 8 games, including six shutouts. A demolition job against Sutton United was broadcast on TV and I was hopeful this would lead to some more faces through the turnstiles (spoiler: it didn’t!).
Now that we were a few months in, I tried experimenting with our tactics. I ended up moving back to a one DM system, and focused play down the right where Ruffles and our right wingers were racing forward. My hope was that when Fabio Saraiva happened to have the ball on the left wing, he could then cross balls over to those players overloading on the right side.
The results were okay, with a 2-2 draw against Stevenage despite having a man advantage for most of the match, a 3-0 victory over our National League South foes, Havant & Waterlooville, and a 3-0 defeat at York City. I then went back and forth between the new and old tactics during the game, using the more attacking 4-1-3-2 when we needed another goal. This worked decently well but was not great – especially when we played on the road.
A fun game against Harrogate Town in our first match in December – we were down 2-0 until a Saraiva goal was scored off a Kai Corbett (the blonde winger) cross in the 60th minute. Morris scored 15 minutes later with a one-time shot in front of goal directly after another blondie pass. Then, after a reply by Harrogate, Morris again took a pass from Corbett and hit a sizzling strike from just outside the box. The comeback was complete and gave us good vibes to score quite a bit against Dag & Red in the FA Trophy. Enock Asante, our on-and-off striker, was again lighting up the scoreboard, this time with a hat trick. Morris, Pressley, and Asante became Kingstonian’s primary scorers this season while Jayden Reid took a step backwards, failing to find the form in the striker role that he had enjoyed the previous season.
After being drawn against the minnows of Biggleswade Town, I became very optimistic that we would win the FA Trophy. Realizing that this was probably my best shot ever at winning this elusive trophy in this game, I began researching and planning my game against Aldershot Town. You may recall that Aldershot Town had been promoted as champions of the National League South the previous season. This season, they had continued their excellence and were fighting for a playoff spot against the likes of Dulwich Hamlet and Notts County. I tweaked some of our team instructions to account for Aldershot Town’s strong defense and told the boys to try to work the ball into the box to break them down and focus play on the left side of the pitch to take advantage of the slower defender Aldershot had on that side.
An impressive 41 shots were taken by the Kingstonian men and yet, our quality was abysmal, with only 10 on target. We seemed destined for a loss when a careless foul in the box in the first half of extra time gave us the lead on a Saraiva penalty kick. We kept the pressure going and ultimately held on for a 2-1 victory.
The draw for the FA Trophy semi-final would either be against fellow National League side, Notts County, or one of the remaining NL South teams, Maidenhead United or Blyth Spartans. After a lot of praying, I was pleased to see us drawn against Blyth. We were going to do make the final!
My overconfidence got the best of me. We were prepared to dominate at home, but our finishing was poor, with only 3 of 14 shots hitting the target and none going in. Not to worry, we still had a second leg! Heh heh, yikes. I was so confident we’d get a result. And it looked good early on too, with an Asante goal four minutes in. However, we failed to capitalize on any other chances and lost on the shootout, 4-2, with missed goals from Morris and Saraiva. Thankfully, Notts County went ahead and won the damn thing so I felt some solace in pretending that had we advanced, they would have defeated us too.
This focus on the FA Trophy left us playing rotated sides in the league games, and we began to drop points left and right. It would take a perfect April to regain the playoff spot we had held for most of the season.
April was not perfect. But neither was this whole second half of the season – we didn’t score more than 2 goals in a match for the final two and a half months of the season. Not a recipe for success.
We ended up four points behind a playoff spot. Despite this, I was actually quite satisfied as I felt like there wasn’t a playoff team (including us) who would overcome the strong defensive teams like York City or Dulwich Hamlet. This defeatism turned out to be a blessing as our final three games allowed me to test a new tactic of dropping back one of our strikers to an attacking midfielder role. This was mainly done because I wanted to see how Dominic Birch, an attacking central midfielder from our first intake, would do and also because Reid and Simpson had been so poor this season. Birch oozed potential with great off the ball skills, good balance and agility, and could serve as a backup striker. His only issue was that he was downright awful at anticipating situations. Birch played decently well in his audition and the final three victories of the season were the proof that I needed to focus on this 4-2-3-1 tactic going forward, once and for all abandoning the 2 DM system.
My prediction that York City or Dulwich Hamlet would advance did not come true. Instead, Aldershot Town secured back-to-back promotions. What a performance by the AI and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that happen before.
Best XI
You can see that Jones played really well and took over for Laing in the central defense this season. My two wing/full-back signings, Ruffles and Hernandez, also played better than those positions had provided in the past. With Dronfield in front of this four, my defense is looking pretty good for next season. Defise was a disappointment and I may look to offload him to another club next season; so much for revenge. I’m sure TJ Bramble is upset he started less games after his heroics last season but he is just kinda average.
Due to the logjam at striker, I bumped Morris to a right-wing role by the end of the season and he performed very well, stopping the carousel of players on that side. Asante did well too, but his goals primarily came in bunches and he was prone to disappear completely for weeks at a time. Pressley was our most consistent goal-scoring threat and helped to cover the concerning decline of Reid.
Saraiva is getting older and his attributes are dropping; I probably need to find my left winger for the future. I also feel like I need a better goalkeeper and maybe even a replacement for Laing. But, overall, I feel like we are in good shape if we focus on the league better next season. I know the FA Trophy win is one of my goals but after seeing what Aldershot Town did, I’m jealous we didn’t match their ambition on our way to becoming Kings of London . . .
The Kings of London 