Football Preview: Notts County

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Manager Moniz’s style will be Notts County personified, in that it will be very much boom or bust with no middle ground. It's a manner of play that will either revolutionise lower league football, or find Ricardo unemployed within a few months.

We're pretty isolated now here in Nottingham, with only five opponents within a 100-mile radius. We've been spared the excruciatingly long midweek trips, thankfully, but that doesn't mask the fact we still need to venture as far afield as Carlisle, Plymouth and Yeovil.

Such isolation of course means the opposition’s journeys are equally as long. If Meadow Lane felt like a morgue at times last season, this time won't be much better. The away fans are likely to split the cost of a taxi to get here. Even then they'll be stuck at the opposite end to the more vocal Notts supporters in the Kop, so crowd interaction certainly won't be on the agenda this year – aside from the Mansfield lot for our first home game of the season.

It's the very bottom rung of the Football League. It isn't all that long ago that we were beaten to the League One Play-Offs by God-awful Stevenage. In the here and now, we have to travel to their dive for the first game of the season. It's depressing, but no less than we deserve after last season. There we'll come up against their new manager, Teddy Sheringham, which is about the most bemusing managerial appointment of the summer – words that could quite easily return to haunt me come around 5pm on Friday 7 August.

Just get us out of here. Sharpish.

 

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The enigmatic Dutchman Ricardo Moniz could do little with the second-hand tools at his disposal last season to help Notts avoid the drop. However, having been given a summer to assemble a squad hopefully capable of promotion, his attack-minded philosophy has already won plenty over in pre-season. For a club starved of much entertainment over the past few seasons, at least the new top-heavy Notts County won't be boring to watch.

Every so often a signing comes around in the lower leagues that catches everyone's eye, and whom rival supporters wonder why their club couldn't go out and do that. Well, this summer it was us, with the capture of Chelsea-conquering Jon Stead from Huddersfield. And the early signs of the link-up play between him and Jimmy Spencer in pre-season are promising. Our very own ‘SAS’ will terrorise League Two defences enough by themselves, whether or not we land Craig Mackail-Smith as well.

Against all odds, there's a rampant optimism at Meadow Lane this summer. Relegations are dire occasions at the best of times, but being two minutes away from safety only to concede three goals in five minutes? Even we couldn't see something so spineless on the horizon. Weeks of in-fighting followed, before chairman Ray Trew let us know he was back in a big way with talk of what was to come. Before we knew it, a slew of signatures was acquired from players of pedigree, and we're smashing teams by eight or nine goals. We know all too well not to get ahead of ourselves, but we're looking forward to a new season for the first time in a long while.

Notts kicked off last summer’s transfer activity with the capture of Jimmy Spencer, and his partnership with Ronan Murray was a key component in avoiding relegation under Shaun Derry. Last season was an ACL injury and a write-off. However, he looks fit again and raring to go. The velcro first touch is there; he's looking possibly more accurate in front of goal than he was previously; and he's going to bully lesser defences into submission. Welcome back, Jimmy lad.

A ball hasn't even been kicked yet, so this is the perfect time for potentially massively misplaced optimism.

Notts County website