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I have been keeping an eye on pre season friendlies by other teams and pose the question.. who be early pace setters in our league at the start of the season.. i'm not worried whether they fall of later on.. i'm only interested in how they start off especially if they are meeting us in the first ten games..
Dover have had a good pre season and I think may be a bit of a dark horse to start with. They beat Gillingham from league one which even with trialists is still a good result as Gills wouldn't want to lose to a team two leagues below with loss of pride.

Grimsby beat Notts County 3-0. and with an astounding £100,000 raised by supporters and companies in their lets raise money for promotion bid they pose a real threat..they also have 2500 season tickets sold too.. money talks in our league and it may well when we play them.

Cheltenham beat Bristol rovers 2-1 to continue a good pre season build up. they met Sheffield Utd only to lose 3-1 but put up a good display.. other teams lower down the pyramid than Cheltenham have been given a good stuffing by the Robins.

Macclesfield have had a reasonable preseason and although losing narrowly to Bury. They did gain a draw against Rochdale. then beat Stockport convincingly so set themselves up nicely for the new season.

Woking have had a mixed bad of results losing to Staines and Pompey but wining against Oxford utd.

Eastlegh have also had a mixed bag or results losing to Oxford and beating Newport county 2-1 but with Ross Flintny out through injury they have turn to ex gull Michael Poke to stand in between the sticks.

halifax have had a good run of pre season results but nothing to crow about against lower league opposition.. but its been steady and should help confidence a bit.

Well that starts off my round up.. what do you all think

With so many team changes and triallists taking part in pre-season matches, it would be a mistake to take too much meaning from these friendly games, although, as you've indicated, Glos, depending on who the opposition have been, a run of results could offer, if not significance, then at least some pointers. These should be taken in combination with other factors: the money available to a club, and the size of a club's support.

As you say, Glos, money talks, and the number of season tickets sold is important. But the number of season tickets sold as compared with previous seasons is also significant. For a club like ours, given its recent history, to maintain or even increase its sales could be as good an indicator (nothing more) as Grimsby or Wrexham selling their tickets in much larger numbers. Those clubs will obviously have an edge thanks to their superior income and fan support. We may be David to their Goliath, but, always remember, David won that battle!

There will be more than one club this season sweeping relentlessly through the National League like a tsunami, and clubs like Grimsby could surge ahead from the start, along with a few of the other teams which led our recent poll: Tranmere, Wrexham, Eastleigh, Cheltenham, Gateshead. Some of these could fall by the wayside. But there is always one unfancied club coming through to join them and to make a surprising challenge despite its disadvantages. I see no clear-cut reason why one of those should not be the Gulls.

We may or may not win promotion this time, but we sure as hell can have a damn good campaign with loads of interest and excitement.

Agreed. Pre-season should not be taken as any indicator of which club is more likely to start the season well, or which club is the front runner to do well, from TUFC point of view we've so far to had to much of a mixed bag of trialist players, been unfortunate that due to off field problems we've started a good month behind most clubs.

Depends also on who you play, and how committed your opponents are in pre-season games. You can't really tell until early December/Christmas time as we all know, we'll know by then exactly what level our squad is at, and who men and boys of the NL premier are, as money doesn't always guarantee success, Bristol Rovers should have walked the division last season on their budget, FGR should have been promoted each of the last four seasons and haven't, so who knows.

Ludicrous thread - pre season friendlies mean absolutely nothing.

brucie wrote:Ludicrous thread - pre season friendlies mean absolutely nothing.

That's certainly true in black and white terms, Brucie, but Glostergull almost certainly intended a more nuanced discussion of the new season in the light of pre-season games, even if that takes the topic to a hypothetical level. In which case, your post could also be said to be ludicrous..

Hell fire and little fishes.. I agree with Gull scorere..what next. PC signing Minions in attack

I agree that Grimsby will be a team to watch, the investment and fan base that they have is crying out for football league football. I expect them to both start well and maintain that throughout the season.
I think that Tranmere and Cheltenham will start off well. If you look at the signings that Tranmere have made then half of them could walk into a League Two teams, the likes of Andy Mangan and Scott Davies. However I think that Cheltenham will die off and have a 7th/8th place finish and look to build on it in the season after next. If you think back to when we were relegated after losing to Gateshead on the opening day we all thought 'here we go again' and then we went on to take the league and adapted to it like a duck to water I remember after Luke Young's free kick at home to Woking, we were top of the league and everyone was looking at Torquay thinking 'they are going to do it this year' and that we were going to do well. We all known what happened after that.
The big test for teams like Cheltenham will be against the 'lesser' teams of Guiseley and Barrow etc, as we lost to AFC Telford 4-3 away (downes and Ajala being sent off ) and we ended up not looking back, we soon descended down the league
Forest Green should do well in the early stages after their investment, along with Wrexham and Gateshead (chances are Bowman will go out like a house on fire, scoring for fun at the start )
We have to wait until about December/January to see the real contenders our run of fixtures at the start features most of the promotion contenders (Wrexham Woking Grimsby Cheltenham Eastleigh) everyone will be thinking we will do rubbish if we loose the first three or four everyone will be calling for Cox's head
The start of the season is not really anything to go by
11 weeks into the season last season Bournemouth were 11th and we know what happened with them in the end

Added in 5 seconds:
I agree that Grimsby will be a team to watch, the investment and fan base that they have is crying out for football league football. I expect them to both start well and maintain that throughout the season.
I think that Tranmere and Cheltenham will start off well. If you look at the signings that Tranmere have made then half of them could walk into a League Two teams, the likes of Andy Mangan and Scott Davies. However I think that Cheltenham will die off and have a 7th/8th place finish and look to build on it in the season after next. If you think back to when we were relegated after losing to Gateshead on the opening day we all thought 'here we go again' and then we went on to take the league and adapted to it like a duck to water I remember after Luke Young's free kick at home to Woking, we were top of the league and everyone was looking at Torquay thinking 'they are going to do it this year' and that we were going to do well. We all known what happened after that.
The big test for teams like Cheltenham will be against the 'lesser' teams of Guiseley and Barrow etc, as we lost to AFC Telford 4-3 away (downes and Ajala being sent off ) and we ended up not looking back, we soon descended down the league
Forest Green should do well in the early stages after their investment, along with Wrexham and Gateshead (chances are Bowman will go out like a house on fire, scoring for fun at the start )
We have to wait until about December/January to see the real contenders our run of fixtures at the start features most of the promotion contenders (Wrexham Woking Grimsby Cheltenham Eastleigh) everyone will be thinking we will do rubbish if we loose the first three or four everyone will be calling for Cox's head
The start of the season is not really anything to go by
11 weeks into the season last season Bournemouth were 11th and we know what happened with them in the end

As if to prove that pre-season form means very little, one of the worst pre-seasons I can remember us having was the year Leroy got us promoted.

Lost 4-1 to Fulham (I think, although that might have been another year. Either way we lost our "marquee" friendly"
Lost 3-2 to Swindon
Lost 1-0 to Wimbledon
Lost 1-0 to Tiverton at Plainmoor(!)

New York Red Bulls did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_Abang

BNAG that's bang out of order

After reading some of the posts today, this post was not such a dumb idea as one or two indicated.. indeed we have met some of the teams at the top end of their game. whether they remain so is up for discussion.. but one thing is sure. we had better not meet teams who are near the top every week or we won't be challenging for anything bar a relegations fight. But then. this is united we are following isn't it. lol
I'm not sure anyone would have predicted FGR going out all guns blazing in the first 6 games like the way they have,, ooh I would love it if we were the first team to beat them.
We now have a run of 6 games against teams who are either below us or close to us.. this will be a much better test of where we are going to finish.. get a good run of results against them and we could gel and gain enough confidence to finish higher than we would otherwise expect to finish. Cooommmmmmeeeee oonnnnnnnnn yuuuooooooooyyyeelllllllooooooowwwwwwwsssssssss