Happiness ain't certain, you know the heartbreak's guaranteed
Cambridge United 2024/25 season preview
The positive vibes around Cambridge United heading into the 2024/25 League One campaign took a hit over the weekend following an anti-climatic conclusion to pre-season and a sadly predictable spate of injuries.
On Friday night, something resembling our strongest XI beat a young West Bromwich Albion side 1-0, while on Saturday our own youth team made the trip to St Neots and were comprehensively dispatched 6-0 by Colchester’s seniors.
The two-game weekends we’ve been playing over the last few weeks must have seemed like a good idea at the time they were arranged, but it’s hard to imagine anyone involved learned much from either of the most recent fixtures given that both were, to some degree, a mismatch. We did learn that the treatment room is already filling up, with new signings Gary Gardner and Ryan Loft, along with Jordan Cousins, on the sidelines for unspecified periods, and Paul Digby picking up some kind of groin injury while chaperoning the children through the Colchester match.
With the squad already looking stretched, some new additions will be needed this week ahead of Saturday’s season opener against a well-funded Stockport County team that will no doubt be buoyant following promotion from League Two last season.
In these circumstances, bringing any points back from Edgeley Park could be tricky, but what is the outlook for the season as a whole? As befits someone who has spent the last month listening to the new Los Campesinos! album on repeat, I feel simultaneously depressed and optimistic about our chances.
It’s been many years, since I played a high line
As I said in my previous post, by most measures last season was a small improvement on 2022/23, something which was no mean feat given the budgetary constraints we operate under relative to most other teams in the league and the fact that we cycled through three managers in six months.
The task for Garry Monk is to take that one step further and address the problems that have dogged us throughout our stay in League One: a lack of ability to retain possession, consistently create good chances and score goals.
Although the results weren’t particularly eye-catching, there were positive signs at the end of last season that Monk has an idea of how to fix this ongoing issue. The switch to five at the back, with Danny Andrew as a progressive third centre-back and a box midfield supporting a lone striker, negated the issues caused by the lack of mobility of our only available midfield pairing, Digby and Cousins, and gave the team a much more joined-up feel, ultimately helping us pick up the results we needed for survival.
Based on pre-season, five at the back is here to stay, and despite Mamadou Jobe’s injury we have decent options in central defence. The onus is likely to be on Zeno Ibsen-Rossi and Kell Watts to carry the ball into midfield, with Michael Morrison sweeping up behind.
Ahead of them, we’ve done what looks to be some significant upgrade work, meaning we no longer need to mitigate the limitations of dreaded Digby-Cousins axis. Monk seems to be favouring one holding midfielder in Korey Smith, flanked by two more dynamic players. You would imagine Gardner will take one of these positions when fit, but in his absence, and with Taylor Richards only having managed 25 minutes of football in pre-season, it seems like James Brophy and Sullay Kaikai will be trusted with these roles.
I like this set-up in theory but have some concerns, not least the pressure it puts on 33-year-old Smith to cover a lot of the defensive ground, and on Brophy and Kaikai to show physicality and discipline when out of possession. The way they played against West Brom were positive in this respect, but whether this will translate into a real League One game is another matter. It feels like there’s a real danger we will sacrifice some defensive solidity in pursuit of a high-possession attacking game we’re not good enough to execute effectively, ending up with the worst of both worlds.
Pressure will also be on our wing-backs to deliver from the flanks, and all the available options have question marks, around age (Andrew), quality (Gibbons), consistency (Bennett) or not actually being a wingback (Brophy). I think we’re a short a player in that area, particularly down the left, and would see this addressed before the window closes, but am not confident this will happen.
In the bar, boring on about xG
Up front we face the same problem as last season: replacing our main goalscorers (the departed Ahadme, Okenabirhie and Taylor contributed 19 of our 39 league goals in 2023/24) while also trying to improve on an overall goal tally which was the joint second worst in the division. If we want to score more regularly, taking a few extra shots would be a good place to start - last season the U’s had less efforts on goal than any other team in League One.
The eagle-eyed among you will note that a couple of the teams listed above still managed to have good seasons, which points to the fact that we were also spectacularly inefficient at converting the chances we did create. Our xG ratio - the number of goals we scored vs the number we should have scored - was also the worst in the entire league; the stats suggest we should have netted 17 more times than we actually did.
As it stands, the entire burden of changing this situation rests on the shoulders of Shayne Lavery. And while he has enjoyed a promising pre-season, and will hopefully get support from Loft, Elias Kachunga, and others, it’s a bit of a stretch to think that our attacking output will noticeably improve without some serious work in the transfer market between now and August 31.
I pray to a league table, but still it don’t change
Given that even I’m struggling to make the case for us surviving, it’s probably not a surprise that we’re being tipped for relegation in virtually every season preview that has been spewed forth onto the internet by the ever-growing number of EFL pundits
The general consensus is that League One this season will be stronger than ever, and while it’s true that most of the new teams look formidable (and there is a distinct lack of obvious basket cases), I don’t necessarily think our task is that much different this year than it was in 2021/22, just after we were promoted.
A glance at the final table from that season shows a top half absolutely stacked with big teams with big budgets, but United held their own and finished as one of the best of the rest. The split between the haves and have-nots might not be quite so even this year, but there is still a group of eight-nine teams against whom we should be broadly competitive.
Finishing above four of these teams should not be beyond us, but doing so will require a deeper squad, and it has been frustrating to see how the recruitment has stalled in the last couple of weeks after a promising start to the summer. It feels like we’re going into the season a fair way short of where we want to be, and that will need to be remedied quickly.