Should be a decent crowd in today by all accounts, rain clearing up.

2-1 home win , goals from JP and Muitt

For some reason I don't fancy us today. Never works out well when we rile up the opposition on Twitter.

They did lose one of their best players, Pendlebury, this week though. 

Dorking 1-1 Farnborough (Carter)

1,555 att.

I imagine it will be the same team as last week but Rutherford in for Young.

I’m going 3-2 Dorking but having to miss it today 

Dorking to win this 3-1 (Muitt, Prior and Carter)

@calvertskans Good call. Agree on the winding up bit - they were most definitely up for this one, despite really having nothing to play for.

Marc on Twitter saying it was their cup final probably didn’t help. Kuhl was excellent for them, knew he’d have a good game. Still think it’s a shame we let him go

Picking up on Tom's point (on 'X') - what are everyone's thoughts on our performances over the past few games.

Personally, I think we've not played great since Salisbury, grinding out 2 results in difficult games, but yesterday felt different. We've not been outplayed (second half) like that for a very long time. 

Is there a deeper reason? I agree with Marc that we seemed tired second half which is a bit strange - some players faded quite badly - and we just couldn't cope with the pace which made me think of some of the NL games. Only Jimmy, Harrison, Alfie and Josh Taylor came out of yesterday with any real credit (we looked way poorer once Alfie came off).

Is our defence too old, too many games, wrong tactics, too intense a period and we're now paying for it? Or just one of those games.

Welcome your views!

I would go as far to say that was the worst home performance I've ever seen from Wanderers. Althought we've obviously had worse results, I don't remember seeing us played off the park like that ever at Meadowbank. We were very fortunate to come away with a point which is a crazy thing to think considering we were 2-0 up and cruising after 20 mins. 

As @adeb said though, we've not played well since Salisbury and in fact I would say Salisbury and maybe Slough were our only good performances in 2025 so far. I was surprised to see so many people disagree that we played poorly against Welling and Tonbridge. The only difference between those games and yesterday was that Farnborough actually had some quality in their side and are capable of creating chances and scoring goals.

Not playing well is fine if you can keep grinding out results, which is what Maidstone did when they beat us to the title a couple of years ago but with so many teams pushing for the title this season, we can't afford to keep putting out performances like that, especially at home.

Muitt and Foulkes were the only positives from the game along with the 2100+ crowd which was great to see. Hopefully the decent weather stays now and we can see 1600+ crowds every home game.

Will be interesting to see who plays midweek as certain players definitely need some minutes (where was Brooking yesterday?!) and some players clearly need a rest. 6 points from Enfield and Chelmsford now an absolute must if we want to stay in the title hunt.

@calvertskans What are your thoughts on the reasons, Tom? I agree the second half was a real concern, we couldn't get a foot in.

And yes, where is Mr Brooking - we really could do with him right now.

I wasn't at the game on Saturday but instead got a good reality check watching a couple of League 1 & 2  games, where the jump in quality, physicality and pace was very obvious.  But got some nice comments from Wrexham fans we bumped into. 

Was surprised to hear your comment @TomCalvert about the performance - there have been some stinkers! And we seem to have created decent chances. But second half fades have been a theme. If it was a fitness thing, why is Marc playing the same starting XI pretty much every week?

I think over the last few weeks we have got more points than we might have expected, but this may have been the result of scoring early in some games and then sitting on the lead - always tempting and usually dangerous.  But on those pitches at Hornchurch and Welling a possession based game was way too risky, so it was a case of winning ugly and moving on.  The defence has looked pretty solid but against largely limited teams. Any team with pace on the break has looked dangerous. 

On team selection, I would like to the best quality players spend more time on the pitch - Brooking and Murphy for example, Young and Williams too.  That must help to improve performances.  Playing possession based football needs defenders who are comfortable playing out from the back, and TC and DG are not quite that, despite both being outstanding defenders. So Marc has mixed up the tactics, going long more, which I think has helped get results but producing less convincing-looking performances.  Hopefully, Saturday was an odd one, in terms of performance, and good to get a point from. There will be some tough games to come for sure, but we are still very capable of beating any team in the league.  

Posted by: @adeb

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@calvertskans What are your thoughts on the reasons, Tom? I agree the second half was a real concern, we couldn't get a foot in.

Hard to put it down to one thing as I think there have been a few issues in recent games.

I think we go a bit too defensive when we take leads in games (Bath, Hampton, Farnborough, Welling, Hornchurch, etc) rather than try and capitalise on periods where we're on top and kill the game. Marc said himself that he purposefully did that against Welling when we took an early lead and it really showed as we didn't have a shot on target the rest of the game.

Still don't think we rotate enough as we've basically had the same 11-12 players starting throughout February. I think that contributes to second half dips in performance quite a bit. I appreciate we had a very congested run of fixtures through Feb so fatigue was likely to always be an issue but we could have rotated in certain positions much more than we have.

A couple of not so great pitches and conditions thrown in there as well obviously won't have helped performances although I don't think the pitch at Welling was anywhere near as bad as Hornchurch for example.

Going forward, as long as we get training loads correct, I think having just the one midweek game (excluding Surrey Senior Cup) between now and the end of the season will be a real benefit. That being said, I would like to see us make one more signing in that left wing position. A lot of other sides near the top have added real quality to their sides in recent weeks so I would like to see us do the same to get us over the line.

On a side note, I would love to see the stats from Saturday but Dorking v Farnborough is the only NLS game with no stats published yet... 🤔 

@calvertskans Here you go (attached) - from Marc btw

'From Marc' lol. Bit like Marc's Monday afternoon broadcast where he tried to retrospectively sugarcoat the performance, even though he himself admitted it was 🤡 (there's no poo emoji!) on Saturday after the game!

That second half was the most one sided, as the saying goes, lies, damned lies and statistics!

Ok it wasn't Macclesfield away (5-0) or Gateshead away (6-0) bad, but it felt like we were pathetic compared to Farnborough.

Did wonder if it would go tits up when Marc said in his post match interview a week ago (after Welling) that no, the week would not be about rest, but to keep the pressure on the players. 

When half of them looked knackered at Welling and were holding on.

The club is still leading the table (and will be after tonight) but will have to watch other teams rack points up whilst we hopefully do the bare minimum and play the stiffs against Merstham in the cup.

We are still in the driving seat (just) and need to avoid any distractions right now. I still think we are the strongest team, would be nice to hear the club come out and say it too, this isn't a play-off push by the way, we need to win it. With our home form I really don't wan't Maidstone or Joe Cook's Worthing coming here and playing better than us on our own dreadful theatre of rubber.

@dorking-raider To be fair it was a bad half amongst a really good run of wins, and looking back whilst they had a few more decent chances, we should have put away at least one more, and should've been out of sight first half.

Losing Alfie seemed to change things, and changing shape didn't help so it kind of felt we were caught out. 

Francombe was responsible for their equaliser too, very poor.

Onwards and upwards. I still fancy us for the title, despite Marc playing things down 🤣