ONE swallow doesn’t make a summer and one defeat doesn’t make a season, but Saturday’s defeat was a real damp squib for almost all concerned bar the small continent in attendance connected with Curzon Ashton.

By half-time all of the positivity that radiated from the club over the summer months felt like it had evaporated in the baking conditions at Blackwell Meadows.

For me, the first day of the league season is a bit like the first round of the FA Cup – well, the second qualifying round. You approach the game with loads of positivity and expectation and with little thought to the potential pitfalls that lie ahead. The first 25 minutes lived up to my pre-game positivity. We were all over Curzon. We moved the ball around pretty well. We looked a real threat from set pieces. We got the goal from Simon Ainge. We looked good and the thoughts for the rest of the game focused on how many we would score to put the game to bed.

Then they equalised and it was an odd one. From the other end of the ground, it looked like Jonny Maddison had dealt with the cross and then he hadn’t. I hurriedly looked over to the linesman and then the referee desperately hoping there was an explainable reason for the ball ending up in the back of our net but there was none coming. The goal was given. It was a blow but surely one we could have coped with. We’d dominated the game up until that point. Surely we would just turn it back on again. Nope! You often hear the cliché ‘goals change games’ and it could not be more true for how the rest of the game panned out.

This wasn’t quite a Devon Loch moment as we were far too far out from the finishing line, but the equaliser had a similar flattening effect on us. Like that legendary Grand National, our team were left flat out as the other rides raced on without us. From looking like we were the only likely winners, the game fell away worryingly with our ability to impact on it dissipating with every passing minute.

Being found out by Curzon Ashton is not an uncommon event. John Flanagan and his ever savvy outfit always seem to be able to hone in on our weaknesses and exploit them to the maximum. On Saturday, that weakness was our narrow set up. I’m not going to knock Tommy Wright for opting for 4-3-3 as regular readers will know I’m quite keen on that particular set up, but the way we lined up saw us looking to tie up the middle of the park. That’s great if the middle is where the action is going to be, but Curzon saw the puzzle they faced and hit us down the flanks. So often, Luke Trotman and Ben O’Hanlon were mobbed with little help from their team-mates. It was a frustrating watch as we could all see what was happening but nothing changed.

Meanwhile up front, we could see how physically strong our front two were, supported by the lively Jordan Nicholson. We caused the visitors all sorts of problems aerially from the flurry of set pieces early doors and yet rarely threatened to get in to positions in open play to put the sort of quality balls in to the box that strikers of the quality of Reece Styche and Simon Ainge would thrive on. They are wasted up there if we can’t provide them good balls in to the box from out wide.

I suspect Tommy will probably have learnt a lot more from this first competitive game than all of pre-season friendlies put together and hopefully he won’t be tardy in making the tweaks to the set up that makes us a bit more effective going both ways. With a run of tough away games during August, hopefully we will have learnt our lesson from Saturday and will be stronger for it.