Marked for Marcel Beck
From our football correspondent
Triumph
Match19 Sep 2035
A 1‑0 win over Bristol Rovers, a place in the next round, and the quiet arithmetic every supporter does on the walk home: how many more until a final?
Match22 Sep 2035
Fleetwood Town make home a hard place to visit
17 without defeat on their own grass. The pitch has not changed; the crowd has — louder earlier, and quicker to sense when the opposition would rather be somewhere else.
Match22 Sep 2035
3‑0, and Charlie McNeill took the headlines on an afternoon when everything Fleetwood Town tried came off. Days like this are retold all winter.
Player ratings24 Sep 2035
A brace, and Charlie McNeill takes the afternoon — 8.75
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Charlie McNeill provided it, and the 8.75 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Player ratings24 Sep 2035
Successful dribbles: 29. Every time he got the ball somebody had to make a decision, and every time the decision was wrong.
Squad24 Sep 2035
Charlie McNeill was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Boardroom24 Sep 2035
The numbers do not look good at Fleetwood Town
Wages have outrun income and the accountants have started attending meetings they used to send apologies to. Ambition comes second in a season like this.
Squad24 Sep 2035
Henry Cartwright falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
The terraces24 Sep 2035
The crowd has taken to Marcel Beck
At 20 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Boardroom2 Jul 2035
The board’s statement ran to three sentences and one of them mentioned results. Joseph Hunter has managed long enough to translate: win soon, or the next statement is shorter.
Squad2 Jul 2035
A fracture rules Ashton Swales out for 23 days
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Fleetwood Town will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Boardroom2 Jul 2035
Nothing has been announced and everybody understands what it means. A board that summons the whole football department on a Tuesday morning is a board that has stopped believing the problem will fix itself.
Market2 Jul 2035
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Fleetwood Town can pretend not to have heard.
Market2 Jul 2035
Ridwan Hassan has one foot out of the door
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Fleetwood Town they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Squad2 Jul 2035
Charley Parker: that is not what I was promised
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Fleetwood Town have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Squad2 Jul 2035
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Fleetwood Town this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad2 Jul 2035
Marcel Beck is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 20 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Boardroom2 Jul 2035
The accounts make uncomfortable reading. Wages first and ambition second is the order of business at Fleetwood Town now.
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad14 Aug 2034
Charlie McNeill was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad14 Aug 2034
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Marcel Beck is 19, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Player ratings14 Aug 2034
There is a version of this player everybody suspected was in there, and on this evidence it is. 8.31, and no argument anywhere in the ground.
Squad14 Aug 2034
Ashton Swales has improved at 24, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Squad14 Aug 2034
Words at Fleetwood Town training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Yoan Pereira is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Match12 Aug 2034
A 1‑1 draw with Blackpool leaves the dressing room somewhere between relief and regret.
Market14 Aug 2034
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Fleetwood Town know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Market14 Aug 2034
Connor Austin is free to find somewhere else
“I was told straight, and I would rather have it straight.” The manager at Fleetwood Town has been clear about where Connor Austin stands, which is more than many ever get.
Market14 Aug 2034
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Fleetwood Town, another week without a signature from Ridwan Hassan.
From our football correspondent
Steady
Market17 Jul 2034
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Fleetwood Town is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Boardroom17 Jul 2034
He will play here until the summer and then walk out of the door for free, having already signed elsewhere. Supporters will manage the first part of that sentence; it is the second they will struggle with.
Squad17 Jul 2034
Krystian Bielik was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad17 Jul 2034
Marcel Beck is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 19 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Squad17 Jul 2034
Words at Fleetwood Town training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Yoan Pereira is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Squad17 Jul 2034
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” George Morrison and Fleetwood Town agree another 3 years.