Peterborough silence the negativity

Tuesday, 06/09/2011

by Chris Harman, Shoot's Peterborough United blogger

With the international break putting a temporary stop to all Championship action, now seems like a good time to assess Peterborough’s start to the season.

It’s fair to say that expectations weren’t particularly high. A frustrating summer in which little went right for the Posh left some fans predicting doom and gloom before a ball had even been kicked.

Signing players proved to be a real struggle. Substantial fees were agreed for the likes of Sam Baldock, Danny Green, Nathaniel Mendez-Laing and Jason Pearce, but none of them fancied moves to London Road.

Of course, we’re aware that we can’t offer the wages that most Championship (and some League One) clubs can, so we don’t expect Championship-standard players to be queuing up to sign for us. But the fact that we failed to land almost everyone on our ‘A list’ of transfer targets was enough to dent the spirits of even the most positive fan.

Add to this the departure of Craig Mackail-Smith, and the delays to the redevelopment of the stadium, and it’s easy to see why many were starting to feel jittery.

Happily though, Darren Ferguson’s men have wasted no time in silencing the negativity, picking up a healthy 7 points from our opening 5 matches. Two seasons ago, the season we finished bottom of this league, we’d earned just 2 points at this stage.

On the goalscoring front, it’s been business as usual. We’ve already netted 12 league goals, including the incredible 7-goal haul against Ipswich. Not bad considering we’ve stepped up a level and lost last season’s top scorer.

Another pleasing aspect of our start to the season has been the way we’ve refused to lie down and accept defeat when in losing positions. We’ve gone behind in all five matches, but we’ve fought back to win two of them and draw another.

A pessimist might question why we seemingly have to concede before we start playing our best stuff, but I prefer to look at it as having good bouncebackability (that word needs bringing back).

A promising start then, but let’s not get too carried away. There’s a long way to go, and a lot of tough matches to come, but early indications certainly suggest we’ll give it a better shot than last time.

Our only objective is to avoid relegation, and if our performances in August are anything to go by, we have a great chance.

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