Player Performance Analysis vs Exeter City (H): EFL League Two
31/10/26
Starting Lineup 5–2–2–1/3–1–4–1
GK Will Norris
RCB Ade Oluwo
MCB Dan Scarr
LCB Will Aimson
RWB Abraham Odoh
LWB Luke Garbutt
CM Elliot Bonds
CM Brendan Wiredu
AM Ben Woodburn
AM Luke Molyneux
CF Macaulay Langstaff
Team Selection
Now then.
Despite feeling that I’d probably be winding up my blog after 147 articles, I just couldn’t hold back from getting my keyboard out to discuss a few aspects of yesterday’s game.
With the next live stream of “The Future is Orange” podcast not due to take place until next Wednesday evening, I wanted to purge myself of my ideas and observations sooner rather than later.
If you haven’t already caught one of the first two episodes of the podcast I co-host with Phil Derbyshire, here’s the link to our YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@Futureisorange
As we’ve tinkered with (and hopefully improved) the visuals since our first recording, I’d recommend you give episode 2 a try via this link
Last word on the pod for now.
If you have any difficulty with finding our channel on Youtube (as I know I have at times) then just type into google The Future Is Orange Podcast, and that should take you straight there. Hopefully you manage to avoid having to trawl through a load of adverts from the 1990’s about Orange mobile.
Anyway, enough of that, lets get back to business.
Changes to the starting lineup since our last game were:
- Nmai in for Graydon
- Woodburn in for Cesay
- Aimson in for Allen
Now, that doesn’t quite do justice to how things panned out at kickoff, and that’s because Kelly Nmai became unwell during the warm-ups, prompting a bit of a reshuffle of the original plan.
The knock-on effect was that Odoh was switched into Molyneux’s right wing-back position, and Luke Garbutt was brought into the starting lineup to fill in at LWB.
This pushed Molyneux into the unfamiliar role of playing as one of two number tens in behind Langstaff. And as the Guardian’s Will Unwin pointed out in his excellent feature (linked below), this led to a rather underwhelming display from the ex-Doncaster player.
PS: The Future Is Orange (TFIO) podcast is also mentioned in the piece as I was interviewed by Will on Friday to provide some context about Salford City’s season so far.
OK. Back to team news.
As Peter Cklamovski referred to in his post-match interview (linked below), the build-up to the game seemed to have an awful lot going on beyond just the injury to Nmai.
I can only speculate but what I think Cuddly Pete is talking about here is the absence from the matchday squad of Kallum Cesay, Jorge Grant and Ryan Graydon.
I take it they were missing for reasons other than the kind of last minute issue that struck Nmai prior to kickoff.
Keeping with me joining the dots, of the group of three missing players, only Cesay seemed like a surprise to be completely omitted from the eighteen man squad.
Grant and Graydon, at least in my opinion, seem to simply not be Cklamovski’s cup of tea. To some extent, Ryan’s lower levels of technical ability compared to the rest of our striking options kind of explains his situation away. But while Jorge may have a number of flaws in his game, close control and usefulness in possession are not amongst them.
For a player who, on the surface, seems to fit perfectly into the vision Cklamovski has for this team, it still surprises me that Grant has only started 5 of 14 matches so far this season. Whether he’ll become more of a regular in the lineup remains to be seen.
My feeling is that he was initially viewed as Powell’s understudy, but the success of the Bonds/Wiredu partnership has essentially put paid to that scenario.
If Cklamovski wants to control the early parts of games by getting out to an early lead, his preferred way of doing it has been by dominating the midfield duels. Wiredu and Bonds have proven expert at this, but due to Grant’s willowy frame that’s not part of his skillset.
Where Jorge does come in handy was shown by his second half appearance as a sub last week against Bristol Rovers. His arrival onto the field brought some much needed composure into our play, and helped us manage the game out to a positive conclusion.
So while our default setting has been to park the bus with defensive subs late in games, Cklamovski does also also have the option to finish matches with Grant’s twinkly velcro toes if that’s what the situation calls for.
But for now our array of ox-like centre backs are doing more than enough to keep the opposition from battering in the front door.
So, as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Whether Taylor Allen was injured or not, I felt it was about time he got some rest and recovery into his legs. As he’s started 10 of the 11 games he’s been available for, I definitely didn’t want him to fall into the the Dan Udoh trap of being overplayed and picking up a medium term injury.
With the depth of squad we have there seems no need to let any of our starters get to the point where they’re running on empty. So, whatever the reason is, I was glad that Taylor got a break from the high workload he’s been put under since joining the club.
To finish this part of the article I think it’s worth pointing out that every other person I see at the minute seems to be suffering from some kind of cold or flu like symptoms. And despite being professional athletes it’s not too far of a stretch to think that something similar may have befallen the lads missing from the matchday squad yesterday.
Anyway, enough of that, moving on now to a few tactical aspects I picked up from yesterdays game.
Tactical Analysis
I’ll start with a bugbear of mine that I just can’t shake off.
In fact, it’s more of question.
When you play a possession based style where you build up play from the goalkeeper, don’t you need at least a few of your defenders to be good on the ball?
It seems a straightforward enough point to me. Square pegs in square holes and all that kind of jazz. Not too much to ask, surely.
Get One Up Front - Salford City FC’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But despite our lengthy winning run, I think we’ve kind of gone the opposite way. In my view, Dan Scarr, Will Aimson and Ade Oluwo are all solid defenders, but none of them look particuarly comfortable with the ball at their feet.
And without the “get out of jail card” (more commonly known as Taylor Allen) to progress the ball accurately into midfield, I thought the cracks were beginning to show against Exeter.
Requiring our three starting centre backs to hit line breaking passes beyond the half way line looked a step too far from where I was sitting.
And I think this issue goes a long way to explaining why we were unable to dominate the early parts of this game. And that’s despite strong starts being something of a trademark in our performances during the last month or two.
I felt the inaccuracy of our passing out of defence forced Wiredu and Bonds to drop deeper than they’d like. I guess this was to reduce the distance the ball had to travel from our penalty area. This certainly helped to some degree, but it also had an unwanted impact that caused us a further problem upfield.
The front of our team became completely disconnected from the back.
With Bonds and Wiredu babysitting the centre backs, it created a huge chasm before you reached the wingbacks and attacking midfielders. And for a team that likes to build intricate passing triangles, that just wasn’t possible because of the overly wide spacing between the various parts of our team.
From this point onwards, we ended up in a no win situation.
If the front three dropped deeper to make themselves available to be passed to, it allowed Exeter to push up and pin us in our own half. If instead Woodburn, Molyneux and Langstaff stayed upfield, they’d likely be starved of the ball as they’d need binoculars to see where the back half of our team was.
I’d add that the lack of physicality and body strength of Woodburn and Molyneux was also a huge problem too. Playing that role as a pair of number tens they’d often need to recieve the ball with their back to goal, while holding off defenders pressing them from behind.
As they don’t have the ability to do that, they got flattened or dispossesed very easily. And this meant the attacking move stopped right there.
And this is where I point the finger of blame squarely at Peter Cklamovski.
I get the strong impression that Luke Molyneux will be picked to start every single game until he starts to be at risk of picking up an injury. And with his pedigree and (reputed) price tag/wages that’s no real surprise.
But the facts are he’s not an attacking midfielder by trade, and he’s already a very lightweight player to begin with.
So, my issue with this selection decision is that Cklamovski’s blind spot with Dan Udoh is starting to become a real issue. The lad is big and strong, and combines this with an excellent ability to link up play in the final third. So starting Molyneux in a completely unfamiliar role ahead of Udoh seems completely sensleless to me.
On a side note, if anyone remembers the teaser photo on Salford City’s twitter page ahead of announcing the Udoh signing they’ll remember it was an image of Dan from the back in his Salford shirt.
What struck me most about this was just how broad he is, and compared to the marathon runner frame of Molyneux, Dan’s athletic bulk would have been a big help to us if we could have drawn on it earlier in the game.
That’s not to say our comeback from a 1–0 deficit was all one man’s doing, but I think there’s a link that both Salford’s goals came after Udoh replaced Molyneux in the 55th minute.
A bit like the Brandon Cooper situation, it appears that Udoh is simply not one of Cklamovski’s trusted lieutenants, and there’s very little he can do to change that. I believe he’s performed well in each of his appearances this season, but even scoring a goal wasn’t enough to get him into the starting lineup for the following game against Walsall.
So what he has to do to make himself more of a fixture in the team is anyone’s guess, but compared to the back up strikers we’ve had at the club over the years he’s by far the best that I can bring to mind.
Sleight of Hand
One thing I may have written about previously is how Peter Cklamovski’s team has a lot more subtlety about it than Karl Robinson’s ever did.
When I think back, the lack of variety in Robbo’s game plans was probably one of the reasons why we failed to achieve a level of consistency over the long term.
In most cases the oppostion could fully expect that the video analysis they’d done on our past few matches would likely be the same they’d face in the upcoming fixture.
And often as not, they’d be right.
If the talent of their team was better than ours, they’d probably win, and the reverse would be true if it wasn’t. As we saw last season, drawing games was a very rare occurence for Robinson’s band of merry men.
But again, there were very few surprises to catch out the opposition, which I feel is more of a hinderance than a help in a sport such as football.
I could be alone on this, but I feel Ckalmovski’s approach is to try and bait the opposition into reacting to what appears to be our Plan A which allows him to then implement Plan B to perfection through the side door.
The biggest learning point I believe Peter took from our early defeats was that other teams prevented us passing out to the wings as frequently as we’d like.
Once Cklamovski took this on board, I started to see us build up our early passing movements through the centre. And this immediately started to have the desired effect.
The opposition began to concentrate their press on our deeper central midfielders, which left us acres of space to pass out towards the touchline.
Not quite magic, but pretty close.
And weeks later, when Cuddly Pete realised that creating space in wide areas was a waste of time due to the lack of aerial ability in our forward line, he changed tack again.
For instance, yesterday I was struck with how narrow we we played against Exeter compared to games during August like the defeat against Chesterfield.
Although we still have Odoh and Co dangling out as bait for the other team to be distracted by, we look to control the central areas to generate attacks as this is where the highest xG scoring chances can be made.
If I was pushed to commit on this I’d say Cklamovski instructs his team to play their passes as if the pitch was only the width of the penalty areas.
The additional space out towards the touchline seem to be a no mans land we don’t want to occupy. I imagine the data likely tells us these wider zones on the pitch don’t provide us with enough opportunities to hurt the opposition, and so we tend to avoid them it at all possible.
I’ve seen often in the last few games that we find some space towards the edge of the opposition box and still turn down the option to cross time after time. That tells me this is no longer an accident or coincidence.
Keeping with this theme of decoy plans, I noticed that towards the start of the Walsall game Taylor Allen launched a deep cross into the penalty area that was quite out of character with our standard game plan.
But then it struck me this was less of an attempt to find the head of one of our strikers, and more about planting the seed of doubt in Walsall’s mind about what they could expect for the remainder of the game.
And this is where the cycle of action and reaction begins.
If they fall for our feint and press us more intently out wide, that leaves spaces through the centre which is what Salford really prefer anyway.
And to finish on this, I completely accept I have zero clue whether any of these theories are actually in Cklamovski’s mind or not, but he certainly seems to be keeping me guessing along with all the other managers in League Two.
My last point on tactics is about how organised we look as a team throughout most games.
This point came to mind yesterday when I was caught out by something I couldn’t understand.
What happened was, we had a noticeable lack of forward runners after regaining the ball in our own half. There was a clear opportunity to launch a quick counter attack, and yet we chose not to take it.
Maybe it’s a as simple as with no Cesay to gallop forward, we chose a different path to build up play in a more methodical way.
But my thoughts now are that this ploy might reveal that Cklamovski is trying to eliminate the chance that other teams can catch us in transition, as we don’t all race forward like the red arrows.
If you look at our defensive record under PK we have only conceded more than one goal in a game on three occassions. To compare this to the start of last season, there was a spell in September/October 2025 where we conceded two goals in each of four consecutive games.
This tells me that the emphasis Peter places on defensive solidity is extremely high, and it really shows.
It seems to be such a priority that we’ve recruited a number of defenders, Aimson and Scarr in particular, who aren’t particualrly suited to our overall style of play, but are top level operators when it comes to protecting their own penalty area.
Substance over style in this case you might say.
I also think that the postions that our players take up in relation to each other, and their movement off the ball into space, is much more choreographed than it ever was under Karl Robinson.
I guess this is to be expected as possession based football is a more finely tuned beast than Allardyce-esque hoofball. But still I think it’s worth pointing out that even though the entertainment level may have increased massively under Cklamovski, the freedom to play off the cuff seems to have reduced to make way for this new way of playing.
By the way, one other way we stop the opposition from counter attacking is by hacking their players down on the half way line before they get up a head of steam. Yesterday we got carded for it a few times, but in games over the last month or so we’ve been much more fortunate as far as the ref’s decisons are concerned.
Bit of a cynical game plan you might say, so maybe Aussie Pete’s not so cuddly after all.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed this article, and many thanks for taking the time to read it.
And finally, don’t forget to tune in on Wednesday evening to our next live stream on the The Future Is Orange podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/@Futureisorange
Have a great week!
