Walsall were always going to celebrate this month, starting with 25 years at the Bescot Stadium, but they are doing it in style. Lying third and unbeaten on Saturday morning, the blazing Saddlers ended the only 100% record in League One with a 2-1 home win over Coventry City that takes them to second behind Gillingham.
They deserved it, too, in a pulsating Midlands derby of high quality and tactical interest. Coventry came with Newcastle’s 18-year-old striker Adam Armstrong, on loan and on fire, with five goals from three games. But Dean Smith, Walsall’s manager, identified John Fleck as “one of the best players in this league; he can pick a pass all day” – and put Romaine Sawyers on him.
With the seasoned Adam Chambers, 34, whose twin, James, was released in the summer, sweeping in front of two cool centre-backs, Paul Downing and James O’Connor, Walsall maintained Smith’s promise of attacking enterprise while Armstrong hardly had a look-in.
The full-backs Andy Taylor (how many left-back Taylors are there?) and Jason Demetriou, overlapped to good effect, often finding each other with raking crossfield passes, and Walsall enjoyed consistent forward momentum through the Slovak Milan Lalkovic and Sam Mantom.
Lalkovic was not born when Sir Stanley Matthews opened the ground but, playing on the left, he repeatedly had Jordan Willis in knots with tricky footwork. Before half-time Anthony Forde had put Walsall ahead and just after it Lalkovic made space for a shot at Willis’s expense. As Lee Burge beat it out, Tom Bradshaw shaped his body to hook the ball in for his fifth goal of the season including a League Cup hat-trick against Nottingham Forest. Willis was substituted. Matthews’ opponents did not have that relief. It was relief for Bradshaw, too, a striker in the tireless Dean Saunders mould who had the tentacles of Réda Johnson all over him in the first half.
Coventry replied four minutes later with a thumping 30-yard shot to the far top corner from Jacob Murphy. The game could have been so different if he had not dithered on a far-post chance early on, allowing Neil Etheridge, a 6ft 3in Filipino, to make a fine tip-away save low to his left. Coventry could have done with a boost then. They had been hobbled in the seventh minute by injury to James Maddison, Murphy being his substitute.
Tony Mowbray, their manager, while hinting that the loss had affected their fluency, gave Walsall “a lot of credit” – not the sort of thing heard much in the Premier League – and said: “Sides are not going to let you walk through them” (a point not to be lost on Northampton’s Chris Wilder, who last week greeted a compelling 3-0 win with a rant at his team for minor deficiencies; they have lost both their games since).
After guiding Coventry to safety on the last day of last season, Mowbray has stabilised the defence with Sam Ricketts from Wolves and added the creative forces of Romain Vincelot from Leyton Orient and Rúben Lameiras from Tottenham.
Smith was especially pleased with the reaction to Murphy’s goal and “how we got back to our passing game”, adding: “Lankovic showed how good he can be. There’s an awful lot of potential here and we’ve got to go out and fulfil it.”
Smith is a long-term Walsall man, starting as a teenager at Fellows Park in 1989 and now the third longest-serving manager in the Football League’s 72, after Exeter’s Paul Tisdale and MK Dons’ Karl Robinson.
This conforms with the stability at the club, whose some-time saviour and long-time chairman, Jeff Bonser, has not always been appreciated by fans – to the extent that he stayed away from home matches to avoid abuse. If, as seems to be the case now, they want him back, perhaps they should fill the home seats instead of falling more than half short. (Coventry’s 2,281 were more responsible than Walsall’s 4,895 for a terrific atmosphere.) The football is rather good. Walsall go again on Tuesday at home to Brighton in the Capital One Cup.
Bonser’s business was in toilet-flush handles and, when the Bescot was built on a sewerage plant, they thought of calling it WC Fields. Now it is coming up smelling of roses.
