All change, all change.

It's safe to say that we have had to get used to many new things this month. A new kit, well three to be exact, a new league and finally a new gaffer. 

It's all change and as it is nowadays, social media is full of fans critiquing the early reign of Johnnie Jackson (JJ) and more importantly, his style of play. Pre-season made it reasonably clear that we would play a 3-5-2 formation and this would be with attacking wing backs and hasn’t changed much with Gunter and Currie the preferred options. 

We have gone away from the high line and press that we had under Robbo and JJ is happier to start play from the back and work our way out through the lines. It has been interesting to see how the opposition have looked to play against us and on the opening day of the season Gillingham started with a high press whenever we had goal kicks and we tried to play out and get our wingbacks as high up the pitch as possible. . Naturally this caused some panic with the fan base as we regularly see EPL players make mistakes and sometimes, as Manchester United showed at Brentford on Saturday evening, a hospital pass to your deep lying midfielder from your goalkeeper, can effectively allow the opposition to have a free run unopposed to goal. 

Whilst we have had a decent start to our League Two campaign, I feel that we are still way off what this team can do and if this was a FIFA Ultimate team, I would say our current chemistry is around 65%. Once it gets used to the style of play JJ demands, it will need many different pairings to click and areas of the pitch to be mastered.

The biggest impact area or pairing is in midfield, with Marsh and Maghoma being the key to this team ticking. I have been mentioning this regularly on our 9yrsTV show as the key to us being able to get on the front foot and also break the opposition high press, or at least as we did in the opening game against Gillingham, get them to think twice and retreat. 

I am not saying anything new for those that have been to see us this season already. Maghoma is the Rolls Royce of this team and once he realises that he is a level above League Two level, he will blossom even more. 

Below are the average playing positions for us over 90 minutes in the four opening games. 

There are loads of things to pick out from these, but simply looking at Marsh (6) and Maghoma (19) you can see that in the three league games, they have played more than average in our half and Maghoma is considerably deep in the Hartlepool away game. 

My overriding concern at the moment is that the deeper these two play, the bigger distances we have between our front pairing and picking up second balls. Maghoma has the ability to break the press and once opposition players get too tight, he can go either way and if he turns out, he has on occasions taken 4-5 players out in one go. 

The Hartlepool average positions shows our lack of forward play and whilst we were very compact, we only have one player regularly playing in the final third. 

We will soon have the luxury of Alex Woodyard and it will be interesting how he works with Maghoma or Marsh as this is going to be a key area this season. I am not going to talk about our wingback sensation too much as he is getting way too much attention already, but if the midfield two perform well, he is only going to look even better. 

At the moment we are trying to get Chislett involved as much as possible and his possession is again linked to us beating the high press or Tzanev being able to get the ball out to our wingbacks. One thing that is noticeable is the close proximity of Brown (3), Currie (26) and Chislett (11) in nearly all the four games. There is no doubt that our preference is to attack down our left and it’s noticeable that once we get the ball out to Currie, Brown bombs on to overlap as Currie is happy to come inside just as much as he can go round the outside. Maghoma drops over and covers the space and that is going to be interesting to see what teams do to combat this.

Currie by his high standards was quieter on Saturday against Doncaster and with Mansfield likely to come at us being the home team tomorrow night, we look set up to be an effective counter attacking team and we could end up being more successful against the early season favourites who are yet to take maximum points. 

With the transfer window counting down, I am anticipating another midfielder to come in and a natural right wingback allowing Gunter to drop into RCB, but one thing is for sure, our Welsh World Cup player is versatile beyond belief and I can see him playing up front at some point in the season and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid.