If Dagenham had even the faintest quantity of battle-hardened resistance within their indisputably strong armoury, they would have contested an FA Trophy semi final over the weekend while sitting neatly perched inside the play-offs.Instead, on what was meant to be their free weekend anyway due to the uneven team quantity within the division, they kept fitness up by playing St Albans City in an exhibition friendly that may well set the tone for an anticlimactic finale to a season seemingly descending towards nothingness once again. Even if Dagenham manage the increasingly unlikely task of gatecrashing the top seven, their catastrophic inability to triumph against similar calibre teams would almost certainly condemn them to another year at this level regardless. While other sides have progressively evolved, Dagenham seem no more intelligent or defensively astute since that glorious curtain-raiser away to Stockport County in late August. Nobody who witnessed the energy-driven masterclass from the bouncing away end at Edgeley Park would have anticipated a failure to make the play-offs altogether, though, especially when it was consolidated by a near-flawless few weeks thereafter. Yet that's where things are seemingly heading unless there's a massive upturn in form akin to their blistering run at the end of last season: a lesser extent of failure, misconstrued by some as success. Ironically a corner appeared to have been turned in one sense last month, during which the Daggers accumulated as many league clean sheets as the rest of their season combined, however the damaging defeats interspersed within demonstrate why that's merely superficial. While beating mid-table teams with nothing to play for is a fundamental necessity, it means nothing when we constantly fall short in the games that really matter, and our three defeats throughout March all contribute to a worrying narrative.
Three very different kinds of loss but all alluding to the same deep-rooted mentality issue. It leaves their season lacking direction ahead of a daunting week in which they play Boreham Wood then Bromley having not beaten anybody inside the current top seven since August; if their hopes are dangling by a thread now, they could be completely dead and buried this time next week unless the Daggers somehow pull off two very uncharacteristic results.
Our cause hasn't been aided, either, by the inexplicable decision to loan out Joey Jones to play-off rivals Grimsby Town - certainly I know which team looked more in need of a driving midfielder when we played them at the end of March. The writing was clearly on the wall for his exit however giving another team the opportunity to unlock his undisputed quality, potentially at our own expense, is frankly remarkable and symbolic of us not being streetwise whatsoever in our approach towards success. The statistics not only substantiate that belief but blatantly portray Dagenham as a bang average side minus the false omen of those opening few weeks where they caught everybody off guard. Once again their performance over the whole campaign has been wholly disproportionate to the healthy budget funding it, for which responsibility lies primarily with Daryl McMahon. Essentially, with the gap beneath the play-offs widening and the remaining games ebbing away, what's required is a near-perfect month during which they collect every available point - certainly there won't be many within the fanbase who have the necessary faith in the team to realistically believe that the season will end in anything but the failure alluded to above.
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January 2024
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