Hammered, battered, crushed, destroyed, trounced, steam-rollered, whipped, annihilated, pulverised, slaughtered, thrashed. Take your pick. We've gleefully dished out some beatings in our time but it's hard to take when you are on the receiving end of a severe hiding like the one we suffered up at Doncaster last week. In the last couple of years, Reading, Oxford and Brentford have all been dispatched for six on the back of scintillating Rovers displays, while our last defeat of any magnitude was a 4-0 stuffing at home by Grimsby way back in December 1997. We did concede five at Colchester in January 2000 but we looked the likely winners in that game until Lomano Tresor Lua-Lua came on late in the game and we let a 3-2 lead slip to lose 5-4 in what was an amazing match. You could hardly count that as a walloping, as Lua-Lua only scored the winner in the last minute, so I was forced to consult the record books to find our last major five-goal mauling. As it turns out, it happened as far back as November 1992, when we got murdered 5-1 by Wolves at Molineux - four days after being stuffed 5-1 at home by Barnsley! We were a First Division side back then, and I doubt many of us would have envisaged getting massacred by the same score in the Third Division just 11 years on. A certain Andy Tillson made his debut in the Rovers defence on that landmark day in Wolverhampton, and what a baptism of fire it was too. This time around, our 5-1 defeat at Belle Vue saw a rare appearance for Sonny Parker, who along with Lewis Haldane were the only players to come out of that game with any credit. After shipping eight goals in two games and losing four out of five, maybe it is time to shake up a defence that is becoming more perforated with every match. Adam Barrett and Christian Edwards started the season well, but something needs to change and I believe Parker is as good a defender as we have at the club. Every time I see him he looks solid, and on the rare occasions he has played at centre back (his natural position) he has been commanding, especially so in the crucial match down at Exeter last season. Sonny performed dutifully at right back last year but he is better in the middle, and aside from a suicidal back-pass on Saturday that resulted in Kevin Miller whacking the ball straight at Doncaster's Michael McIndoe and into the net, Danny Boxall has done well enough so far to merit his place on the right. Boxall made amends for that comical goal with a pinpoint pass from the outside of his boot which picked out Lewis Haldane for Rovers' consolation last week. Haldane showed great strength and composure in bursting past two defenders before slotting the ball coolly into the corner in what was only his 19th minute of professional football. He experienced five minutes against Cheltenham and won a penalty, saw thirteen minutes of action against Mansfield and was involved in winning another penalty, and then scored pretty much single-handedly within a minute of coming on at Doncaster. How many strikers have we seen that flatter to deceive in half a dozen starts before fading into obscurity without so much as looking like scoring, let alone actually putting one of several chances away. I think a full game may still be beyond Haldane in terms of fitness, but I cannot see what's wrong with playing him for a half, particularly if we go in at the break 3-0 up! © Chris Chappell - Friday 10th October 2003 Back to Index