Preview: Exeter (a)

After being dumped out of the FA Cup Wednesday can now concentrate on the league,can the Owls take three points from a long trip to Exeter?

Tuesday night saw the Owls dumped out of the FA Cup unceremoniously in front of the ESPN cameras, although the Yeovil game going ahead at the weekend may prove beneficial in the long term with the Owls now avoiding fixture backlog.

From now until the end of the season it’s all about the league campaign and the first of 3 fixtures in 7 days sees the Owls journey to St. James Park in deepest Devon to take on Paul Tisdale’s Exeter City

All stats come from Soccerbase and Soccernet

Last Away Game	Opposition	Result	Shots	On Target	Corners	Cards	Fouls	Possession
WEDNESDAY	MK Dons	D 1-1	2	0	6	2	7	43%

Last Home Game	Opposition	Result	Shots	On Target	Corners	Cards	Fouls	Possession
EXETER	Charlton	L 0-1	8	4	2	1	4	42%

The Owls last away sojourn saw the two sides turn in anything but a classic with the two sides creating just three chances between them and both goals in the game being scored by the opposition. MK Dons had the better of the possession but did precious little with it as the Owls quite comfortably earned a point.

Artur Krysiak’s howler saw Danny Green net the winner for Charlton in a game where the Grecians proved themselves organised and hard to break down but with precious little attacking threat.Guillem Bauza’s half-chance being as close as they got to scoring.

LAST 5 GAMES	Blackpool (h)	Yeovil (h)	MK Dons (a)	Blackpool (a)	Scunthorpe (a)
Wednesday	L 0-3	W 2-1	D 1-1	D 1-1	W 1-3

LAST 5 GAMES	Bournemouth (a)	Charlton (h)	Oldham (a)	Hartlepool (h)	Chesterfield (a)
Exeter	L 2-0	L 0-1	D 0-0	D 0-0	W 0-2

After a disappointing January, the Owls started February off with a positive result against Yeovil that was “grinded out” so to speak, the fixtures come thick and fast during February with two home clashes against fellow promotion chasers Stevenage and Sheffield United sandwiched inbetween a trip to strugglers Chesterfield, this is a month that could really make or break our season.

Exeter go into this game winless and scoreless in four and haven’t won at home since the end of November, their main problem is a simple one, they struggle to find the net being the lowest scorers in League One with 24 goals, their home defensive record isn’t bad to be fair having conceded just one more than the Owls have at Hillsborough but their 13 at St James Park compared to the Owls’ 29 at Hillsborough is a big difference, coincidentally 29 is also how many more goals the Owls have scored altogether in the League this year than the Grecians, the Owls having scored 53 goals so far this season.

HEAD 2 HEAD	WEDNESDAY WINS	EXETER WINS	DRAWS
	3	6	1

LAST MEETING
24th September 2011,Hillsborough, Att – 16995
Wednesday 3-0 Exeter
(J O’Connor 40,G Madine 43,75 (pen))

Since Exeter won the first meeting in 1968, the Grecians have had the better of the infrequent meetings between the sides. Our last visit to St. James Park saw the Owls on the wrong end of a shellacking as they went down 5-1.

Our victory over the Grecians last September was our first over Exeter since October 1978 where Brian Hornsby and John Lowey secured a 2-1 triumph in front of 11139.

We have never won at St. James park however, our best result there being a 2-2 draw in March 1979 with Hornsby and Rodger Wylde scoring the Owls goals.

MEGSON’S MOB

One off the field issue that has been resolved is the charges against Milan Mandaric being dropped, our roving reporter Creg got this response from Gary Megson “What I think is good for everybody is that it’s now over and done. A credit to him is that it didn’t have any impact on Sheffield Wednesday.”

There will be many changes once again for this one, one is enforced as Reda Johnson begins a two game suspension as he picked up his 10th yellow card of the season against Blackpool, with Daniel Jones still absent from injury, Julian Bennett will probably step in at left back.

Gary Megson mentioned a response to the Blackpool result telling Owls Alive’s roving reporter Creg

“The response hopefully will come on Saturday against Exeter. We’ve got 19 outfield players when everybody’s fit and we were fighting on two fronts. Nobody’s ever said to me ‘I tell you what Gary, give it your best whirl in the F.A. Cup and if you don’t get promoted it’s not such a big deal.’ Because of that all our focus has to be on getting Sheffield Wednesday into a position where it was 15 years ago when it does OK in the league and it gets to the League Cup Final and the F.A. Cup Final but we are one million miles away from that position. The first step has to be to try and improve on the position that we are in the league.”

“We have to play football to try and get results with what we’ve got. We’re a Division One club that’s been right in the cart for fifteen tears and we’re trying to get the place moving forward first and foremost. Our biggest asset isn’t on the pitch – it’s the crowd.”

“The amount of chances that we do create we should score more. Even games that we’ve won, for instance Scunthorpe 3-1, we should win 3-0, when you starting adding them up they tend to make a great big huge total at the end of the season. We’ve got to get to a point where we get to the end of season and we’re not going ‘what if?’ – what if we’d have hung on for a few more minutes against Huddersfield? What if we’d have hung on for a few more minutes against Walsall? From our own perspective we need to look at being better at seeing games out, getting to a point where we are winning 3-0, 4-0 or whatever it might be therefore the end of the game is entirely different. And also to making sure that we keep keeping more clean sheets than we actually do.”

Miguel Llera, Mike Jones and John Bostock are also available again after missing Blackpool through ineligibility with Megson having the conundrum whether to stick with Rob Jones who returned after a minor knock against Blackpool or bringing back the Spaniard who has been enjoying a run in the side as of late.

Jermaine Johnson,David Prutton and Jose Semedo should return in midfield with Gary Madine and Chris O’Grady also coming back into the side as strikers.

Ryan Lowe will probably drop to the substitutes bench and when asked about his recent goal drought Megson responded

 “I don’t think it’s a confidence issue at all. If it was you wouldn’t put yourself in that position to miss, you’d just hide and stay out of the way.”

Lowe was also switched to the right flank during the match against Blackpool with Megson saying

“If we hadn’t have changed the shape we would have had Lua Lua with the freedom of Hillsborough. We changed the shape down at MK Dons after 10 minutes and they didn’t get a kick for 80 after that – they never got anywhere near us. You can’t always be going on what you want to do, you’ve also got to accept that the opposition are going to cause you problems at times as well.”

Exeter should have a fully available squad with no new injuries or suspension worries, the Grecians should be boosted by the return of midfielder Liam Sercombe from an ankle injury.

 BYWATER

	BUXTON		BATTH		LLERA		BENNETT
	J JOHNSON		PRUTTON		SEMEDO		BOSTOCK
			O’GRADY		MADINE

KEY PLAYERS – TOP TRUMPS

Julian Bennett hasn’t had the easiest of times since joining the Owls from Nottingham Forest, one of the casualties from that fiasco at Stevenage, he hasn’t really been able to force his way back into the left-back slot that was undisputably his in the early weeks of the campaign due to the form of Reda Johnson. One ray of hope for him is that Megson has rewarded those who have come back in and done well such as David Prutton and Jermaine Johnson, Reda’s two game ban is a golden opportunity for him to prove that he belongs in the first team.

Daniel Nardiello is a name familiar to us with the former Welsh international having spent time at local rivals Barnsley, despite drifting down to League One the Coventry born forward is still a handful at this level with him having netted 25% of Exeter’s league goals this term, if our back four can keep him quiet, we can stifle Exeter’s goal threat.

THE BETTING BOX:5 OF THE BEST

BET	Wednesday WIN	Exeter WIN	DRAW	Madine 1st Goal	Correct Score 2-1
BEST ODDS	11/10	11/4	5/2	5/1	8/1
BOOKIES

Despite having never won at Exeter, Wednesday still enter the game as favourites with the bookies, Chandlers offering the best price at 11/10, Exeter are rank outsiders and go as far out as 11/4 with Tote. 5/2 is the best price for the draw with bet365.

given the fact that our defenders have chipped in with goals all season you can take your pick at fairly favourable odds with anytime strikes despite the absence of Reda.  You can have Rob Jones at 13/2, Julian Bennett at 10/1 and Miguel Llera at 12/1 with Coral with Danny Batth 16/1 at bet365.

A repeat of Saturday with the Exeter half-time/Wednesday full-time bet is 28/1 with SkyBet.

Nothing jumps out at me this week so I’m going to go with Madine to score first, you can have that at 5/1 with Boylesports.

HERE COMES D-JUDGE

We can’t dwell on the Blackpool game and we shouldn’t either, there’ll be changes galore for this one and it’ll be contested in tough conditions but we showed against Yeovil we can pull the result out in these circumstances and for my money, this looks like it could be a similar contest.

Exeter struggle to score goals and as of late we’ve picked up an unfortunate knack of conceding soft goals with our last clean sheet in the league coming at Preston, we need this to stop and we can’t afford to keep going behind to soft goals like we did at MK and against Yeovil.

We’ve also picked up a good knack of retrieving bad situations but to get into those sort of pickles in the first place isn’t ideal.

I have an optimistic feeling about this one despite our historical lack of success at Exeter, as we showed at Tranmere,Preston and Scunthorpe we can put aside historical bogey teams.

VERDICT:- I think we’ll win this one, it’ll be a hard fought ground out 2-1 for me.

Danny (D-Good)
Owls Alive
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TWITTER: @OwlsAlive or @DGood83