Most people will tell you the last two weeks have been a disaster, the saving grace (kind of) for Esteban Quintas is that we heavily rotated players last week against St Albans.

Spiteri, Halfpenny, Dovison, Leech and Pope all started, having not started the week before, and both Mells and Brennan were left off the team sheet entirely.

We understand the game was on a Monday, which gave only a four day turn around before we faced Preston on Friday but the scale of the rotation seemed reckless this early in the season.

To be fair though, maybe we need to factor in player’s day jobs, which prevent proper post-match and pre-match routines during the week.

However, this early in the season it’s hard to understand why players wouldn’t be fit enough to play two games in five days.

Secondly, what does this say about our depth? Against St Albans, we didn’t just lose, we looked poor, allowing them to dominate possession for large parts of the game, and when we did have the ball we struggled to gain meaningful possession past half way.

Pragmatic football is hard to watch when the first team is winning, but seeing essentially the second team struggling was painful. How are we going to cope with this extended season stretching into December? How are we going to cope with increased competition both at State Level and now at National Level? Based on the early season we don’t exactly look like world beaters. We suppose it’s a long season though and the league is not a sprint, but a marathon. Last year we managed the player load well, dipping in frequently to the Under 23s to help out. Having done it before, hopefully last week’s rotation experiment was just a blip in time.