Crewe Alexandra vs Chesterfield Match report

League Two, 17 August 2024

Why this game?

Crewe are the closest club to home and my wife was working from home so, y’know, she needed a bit of peace and quiet so I took the kids to this.

The story of the game

Two rows in front of us at the ground was a mum and a kid I’d place at around 8 years old. The kid seemed, bluntly, a bit of a handful and, on multiple occasions, motioned to smack his mum in the face after punching her in the arm.

Had he pushed his luck too far, my opinion is that a full on fight between and 8 year old and a fully grown ass woman would have been more of a contest than Crewe vs Chesterfield.

In past pieces, I’ve run through the events as almost a minute by minute as I tend to write these up live. I’m writing this one up afterwards due to being at the game and it’s difficult and essentially pointless to write a play by play because it all boils down to Chesterfield being good and Crewe being really, really bad.

It was 1-0 in under 40 seconds. It was 3-0 in under 12 minutes. It was 4-0 by half time and 5-0 just after. Chesterfield were not flattered by this one bit. They brought a vocal and sizeable support that probably exceeds Wrexham’s promotion party at the end of last season.

Crewe have now lost their last five home games by a combined score of 16-0 - also the only five Crewe games my daughter has attended, whom I’m beginning to think is a curse.

Standout players

From a Crewe perspective, they had a lot of issues in goals last season because everyone kept getting injured. From that perspective, Filip Marschall showed plenty to suggest that, if fit, Crewe won’t have to worry too much. When you have a good game as a keeper in spite of conceding five, it says plenty about how the game went and Marschall definitely did his fair share when it came to keeping the score down.

In terms of negatives, we’ll touch upon a lot of those in the analysis section but, while there were probably worse performers than Jack Lankester, there probably wasn’t anyone showing worse body language - having a go at teammates unnecessarily.

From a Chesterfield perspective, James Berry obviously takes the headlines for his double - headlined by a really good opening goal. Chey Dunkley made several dominant headers to snuff out Crewe crosses and Darren Oldaker dictated the pace of the game impressively.

Analysis

Oh boy…

Chesterfield weren’t as ruthless as they could have been and, while scoring a screamer 40 seconds in isn’t going to hurt confidence, it’s pretty hard not to think that any side in League Two could have turned up today and hammered Crewe. So it’s to them we’ll mainly turn.

There was little they could do about Berry’s opener - losing the ball in just outside the area and seeing him to whip it first time into the top corner with a devilish dipping, curving ball. The second was just poor marking from a corner, with the fourth being a carbon copy.

The third, however, was indicative of Crewe’s issues all game. Markanday cut in from wide and dragged his marker out of position leaving space between the LB and LCB giving a channel for Will Grigg to ghost into - he returned the ball across the 6 yard box to Berry at the far, unmarked and with an easy finish. The fifth would be a similar story - Gordon drifting into space vacated by a RB exposing the defence with the ball coming across, an unfortunate slip and an easy finish as a result for Dobra.

Crewe’s issues all game were in these areas. In a way, it’s easy to point out those areas because Berry and the recently signed Markanday are clearly a step above League Two. But Crewe’s reactions to this challenge were abysmal. 

The defence was forced to cover - a lot. It’s perhaps not entirely on Ryan Cooney and Zac Williams for being full-backs dragged all over the place, but Crewe never filled those gaps meaning Chesterfield always had a crossing option on. When Crewe did make a triple sub in the first half and moved to three at the back, this provided the cover automatically at the expense of a central midfielder but that just opened up central passing lanes. Part of the reason Darren Oldaker had a good game wasn’t just because of his own efforts, but because the movement and gaps Crewe left almost always meant he had a lane ahead of him to either pass or run into. 

Making that worse was Crewe just not being competitive in those areas - Chesterfield’s first goal was from their high press but Crewe’s never got going. Joel Tabiner had a very poor game but it was pretty hard to know what he was actually asked to do - if it was to press, he didn’t, and instead he tried to find pockets of space that weren’t there while leaving a pocket behind him for opposition to occupy.

The result of all that was that Crewe were vulnerable to wing play, so they moved to double up, which left them open in central areas, so they changed shape and pushed the full-backs up, which left them open for crossfield balls. Having to make a triple sub in the first half immediately makes clear that Lee Bell got it spectacularly wrong with how he set the side up but the changes didn’t really improve things by much and it sticking at 5-0 was a result of Chesterfield’s profligacy, Marschall’s ability and, eventually, Chesterfield’s contentment with just passing around and getting Oles.

Crewe were simply miles off it everywhere.

Signs for the season:

What should Chesterfield take from this? Plenty do fancy them and their results so far support the concept that they’ll be around the top quarter of the League Two table this season. The ability they have in wide areas to take apart solid League Two full backs is impressive but they will rarely get any games as simple as this.

For Crewe, I look back to Chris Beech’s Carlisle in 20-21 - a spectacular first half season before falling off totally by the end of it due to reasons more to do with luck than anything else. But that season was then followed by things failing to pick up at all once conditions became a bit fairer. Both are sides with distinctive play, both are sides with relatively inexperienced managers, both are sides who can chalk their initial drop off due to illness and injuries. 

And Crewe, like Carlisle in 21/22, haven’t found themselves able to return to the form that preceded that spell of bad luck. As a result, Lee Bell has to be under serious pressure as manager. On top of that, the feeling of malaise is in the fan-base as well given that, for the first home game of the season, it was a poor attendance, heavily inflated by a large travelling support pushing 1500. While Crewe ended last season by stumbling over the line, those games at least saw Crewe as competitive for large spells of those 90 minutes. 

This one did not and that has to worry the higher-ups at the club.