Banter With Burns - CUSA chairman Jon Burns with his weekly thoughts on Colchester United

The past week has given us some strong, yet disturbing headlines in football.

Firstly, we have one of my ‘second’ teams, Portsmouth, going into administration and of course the media making a massive play of them being the first Premier League club to suffer this way.

They won’t be the last and I’m sure that the witchhunt will find what went wrong, but it will be too little, too late for the Pompey fans.

So what else have we seen?

The Terry/Bridge handshake that never was dominated the early Saturday footy action and then, although not for the faint-hearted, we had the tackle on poor Aaron Ramsey that will see him fighting hard to ever play football again.

Kind of brings you down to earth doesn’t it?

Then we move to Bristol Rovers and the U’s going down 3-2 to, what I would call, an average League One team.

Aidy has told us that he was the most annoyed that he’s been since he joined the U’s and I have to say that I was also less than impressed.

However, I find it hard to really knock a team that sits in fourth place and 13 points above the team in eighth.

So rather than criticise, these are my concerns at the moment.

After the aforementioned images from last Saturday and, in the words of Roy Walker of TV's Catchphrase fame, it’s perhaps time to ‘say what you see’. Firstly, in defence of the U’s, the referee saw the majority of our fouls as cautions, while I thought he was more lenient with Bristol.

That said, and committed he may be, but the silly, early, two-footed lunge from Anthony Wordsworth could have been Ramsey Mark Two if he had made full contact with the player.

Now we all know that Aidy rarely changes a winning team.

An injury to Kem Izzet forced his hand in one position and, although we missed him, his absence did not lose us the game.

My concern now is how the players react to Aidy’s methods of team selection.

I wonder if some of them are too much in their comfort zone and have fallen into a little bit of complacency.

It’s perhaps unfair to highlight Woody again but there was no natural replacement on the bench for him.

Is Simon Hackney injured?

Our bench still had a strong, attacking feel to it with Lisbie, Odejayi, Henderson and the returning Vincent huddling together to avoid the expected rain that thankfully never came.

I would have started with at least two, or maybe three, of these players and even though some were returning from injury, if they’re fit enough for the bench, well then you know the rest.

To win games sometimes you have to gamble.

We did so in the 89th minute when Lisbie joined the action, but it was too little, too late.

He may be unhappy that he hasn’t got a permanent contract and disappointed when he plays on the right, but in my view, our Ipswich loanee is the biggest threat we have and I suspect the opposition defence breathes a little sigh of relief when they see him tracksuited up.

My one final concern is John-Joe O’Toole.

Yes I know that when he missed two games in January we conceded 12 goals and since then he has curbed his love of cautions, but I feel that the team needs more from him in central midfield.

He has played a lot of minutes for the U’s so maybe he is running out of steam.

I’m still not sure about him and I hope that he proves me wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, please.

The U’s are in an excellent position and while I believe that they won’t be the one from the top seven who misses out on the play-offs, if we are to make a challenge for automatic promotion, then some of them need to wake up and smell the coffee quickly.

And I sincerely hope that they do so next Monday night because Brighton are in some fine form and with a Lua Lua in their midst, they’ll be a tough nut to crack.

Aidy has given hints of changes and with a defeat last weekend, he certainly has the remit to do so.

I await his team selection with eager anticipation.

A Saturday off normally means that a little bit of local footy is on the cards for me.

Looking a bit further ahead and I wonder how your travel plans are going for the Carlisle excursion.

The CUSA may still have one or two seats left if you’re struggling.

Good luck Colchester and have a good weekend wherever your footy fix takes you.

Up the U’s!