Wycombe Wanderers

Last Season at a glance

12th in League Two

Each season is getting a touch predictable for Wycombe. They start the season as the most heavily tipped side to do well, yet fail miserably. Certainly over the past two seasons, no side has under achieved as much as Wycombe have, and when we passed them in the table last year, it was something that no one could have even contemplated a few months earlier.

So where did it all go wrong? It was the back end of the season, where in their final eleven games of the season, they picked up just five points and not a single win, and in the space of those matches they slumped from the Play Offs to mid table obscurity.

Perhaps the League Cup run where they reached the semi finals, holding Chelsea to a draw took too much out of them, and they lost their focus from that point on.

Out of all the managers in the division, Lambert will head into 2007-8 with more pressure on his shoulders than perhaps any other manager.

It's clear that his first season in charge was not a successful one in the League. Aspirations are high at Wycombe, and after the disappointment of the previous season, they were certainly expecting better things not worse when they appointed Lambert. Indeed, they finished higher the year before when they sold their top scorer midway through, and had a manager struggling to cope with the death of his wife. Definitely backwards not forwards.

But Lambert must have had something about him to get them through to the League Cup semi finals. But he's not got it about him to halt the slide that he started in 2006-7, he may well find himself as the first manager this season to be given the push.

Well let's give them the benefit of the doubt. That League Cup run proved to be a major distraction for them last season, and perhaps it was almost inevitable that after games against Chelsea, it's hard to get yourselves up for games against Chester.

They've always had good players at Wycombe, albeit under achieving ones, and Lambert has set about strengthening that squad over the Summer. I probably had to update the Summer transfers page for Wycombe more than any other club, and I don't doubt for one moment that I've probably missed 2 or 3 new signings from the list above, on the basis of the sheer number of signings that they have made.

But are the new signings any good? Well Lambert's drafted in his old Celtic team mate Gary Holt from Notts Forest. He's getting on a bit now, but he's played a large number of games in a League One play off side last season, and Lambert and Holt combinations tend to work quite well together. Holt will bring some leadership to a side which perhaps has missed out on that over the past couple of years.

They've also raided Scotland to sign John Sutton, brother of Chris. He's been scoring in the Scottish Premier League over the past couple of years for St Mirren.

Well one of the big problems last season was a lack of goals. Despite having two decent forwards, they finished the season having scored just 52 goals in the League last year. And they've tackled that problem by losing Tommy Mooney - a striker who was responsible for 12 of those, having already lost Kevin Betsy earlier in the year.

They've signed Sutton as we mentioned, but what standard of football has he been playing at? The Scottish Premier League is probably a better standard than League Two but not greatly with respect to some teams, and he may find the transition a lot more difficult than he was expecting to.

I was going to describe Easter as a striker who perhaps hasn't done as well as he could have done, but looking at his stats from last season, it showed that he scored 24 goals in all competition last time out. So its pretty clear that he's done well with the Chairboys.

He had a slowish start for them, following his big money move from Stockport, and he had biggish shoes to fill as he replaced Nathan Tyson, but he's settled well now at Adams Park after just two goals in fifteen during his first season.

He's clearly one of the better strikers at this level, and he's been called up to play international football for Wales on a couple of occasions.

It's not going to be a worse season for them, is it? It's just not possible for them to finish as low down as 12th again.

We've tipped Wycombe to go up now for the last two seasons now, and they've come nowhere close to going up during that time. So why's this time going to be different? Well we don't really know.

Was discussing these predictions a week ago, and mentioned Wycombe as one of the teams to feature to go up, and the reply was "yes, but it's Wycombe". Which it's hard to argue with. They do always flatter to deceive, and there's nothing concrete out there to suggest why they are a better side to the one which finished in twelfth place last season.

The squad is bigger, no doubts about that, but is it necessarily a better one? Is Sutton going to grab more goals than Mooney did? Nobody at this stage can answer that.

It's not a prediction I feel especially confident about. That "but it's Wycombe" has cropped up in my own head over and over again. But I just feel they did under achieve last year in Lambert's first full season with them, and he'll be fully aware of where things went wrong and I do feel he has looked to address these issues.

I am concerned about their goalscoring, but I think they'll be tight enough at the back and I think they can finally start doing what they're supposed to be doing and challenging this time round, with no cup runs to distract this season.