ROVERS FANZ VIEW COLUMN
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The 2-0 victory over Boston last week seems to have infected both fans and players with a few symptoms over the past seven days, not all of them favourable. As some supporters contracted a long-forgotten condition similar to vertigo due to Rovers reaching the heady heights of the automatic promotion places (albeit for three days), unfortunately a few of the playing staff have been struck down by flu, which means it will be a lot harder to stay in the top three over the next week or so. First Dave Savage was forced to miss the Torquay match in midweek due to his illness, and then Danny Boxall went down with a similar ailment shortly afterwards. Hopefully the bug won't have spread to other key squad members before this weekend; otherwise we will be facing a bit of a crisis. Add the fact that Paul Tait suffered a leg injury on Tuesday night to further weaken our threadbare attack, and the manager may have to do a patching-up job with his team. Tait's possible absence would be a major blow, as he has picked up the goalscoring mantle extremely well so far this season and surprised everyone with his recent prolific spell - he now has more than half the goals he ended up with last year, and we are still only in September. His first against Boston was an instinctive flick from substitute Wayne Carlisle's free-kick, while number two was a pinpoint header from another Carlisle centre, despite the stadium announcer trying desperately to get Junior Agogo off the mark by crediting the goal to him. That made it four in four games for Tait, and even after the Torquay defeat he is averaging a goal every other game over the whole campaign, which is all you can ask from your strikers. Indeed the "goal machine" chant is not so ironic now. Kevin Street was the only option to replace him during the interval on Tuesday, and he duly answered the call with what turned out to be our consolation, when he clipped Lee Hodges' perfectly weighted reverse pass over the goalkeeper to put Rovers back in the game. Street should deputise while Tait is out of contention, and I think Ray Graydon would be wise to include one of our youngsters on the bench, perhaps giving someone like Lewis Haldane a taste of first-team action. As the rest of the side is performing well, this is the perfect environment in which to blood some youth, as opposed to throwing them in during a relegation dogfight when everyone else is struggling. Dave Gilroy appears surplus to Graydon's requirements, so why not fast-track Haldane into the senior squad? In turn this may give some of the other kids in the reserves some incentive to do well. Dave Savage's enforced absence in the week paved the way for the return of the two flying wingers, Carlisle and Hodges. Graydon's two promotions at Walsall were built on decent wing-play, with Jason Brissett and Darren Wrack doing the business for him in 1998-99 and then Paul Hall and Pedro Matias in 2000-01, and when he arrived at Rovers 16 months ago he stated that he wanted to employ this playing style here too. Although we lost the game at Plainmoor, I think he should give the pairing a bit longer before dispensing with it. Carlisle and Hodges set up all three goals we scored last week, and if we had not conceded from that freakish deflection midway through the first half, we would have come away with a creditable draw instead of losing 2-1 like we always do on the English Riviera.
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