We went into this game confident that we could extend our winning streak to four on the bounce, but in short we were completely handicapped by players from the squad who failed to turn up on the day. Perhaps if they’d known we had both a lovely new kit and an ipod dock banging out some garage classics, they’d have turned up? We will never know.
With a bare nine, we were fortunate enough to be able to call on the services of Alex Patterson (sporting some natty fingerless gloves) and Sam Morris, both of whom had turned up at the Racecourse hoping they could get a game for the 4’s.
It was an unfamiliar line-up to say the least, with Jason Smith coming into central midfield and Max Kemplen popping his right back cherry. We kicked off up the hill against an EBOG’s team comprising of ten 6 footers, the biggest of which were positioned in central midfield.
This meant that, despite the best efforts of pretty much everyone, the first 20 minutes consisted mainly of our goal kick, their midfield heading it back and then a bit of head tennis before the centre back pairing of McGlogan and Patterson snuffed out any trouble. We were finding it difficult to hold on to the ball, but when we did Sam was pinning them back from the right and Jason was probing effectively, almost putting Jack in on a couple of occasions.
Unfortunately after about 35 minutes Adam flew into a 50/50 with one of their big lads and had to come off injured, leaving us with ten men. A re-shuffle saw Reynolds move out to the left and Jack as a lone striker. We got through to half time at 0-0 and all the talk was off doing the simple things right and getting the ball wide quickly, which is where we’d had most joy.
We kicked off the second half and began to put EBOG’s under pressure, with Murphy and Kemplen getting on the ball more, we were pushing them back and we looked the more likely to score, with Sam going close with a fierce drive which fizzed all over the place. On a rare oppo foray into our box, the ball broke to their forward who drove across the area, McGlogan’s sliding tackle seemed to have won the ball cleanly but their man hit the deck with a Suarez-esque triple pike and conned the ref. 1-0 down and undeservedly so, we came back at EBOG’s, Stewart and Jason were winning the midfield battle and we were getting the ball out wide to Sam, who put in a cross which was turned back into the area and nodded home by Patterson who’d put in the yards from his own box.
Just as we were looking to build on the goal and our much improved play, a hopeful punt over the top between centre back and full back found their forward who lifted the ball over the oncoming Edelman and into the net. With 15 to go we chucked Patterson up front to give them something else to think about aka ‘cause some havoc’, and we went close to equalising on a few occasions, Jack particularly unlucky not to score from two yards out.
All in all a tremendous effort considering that we played with ten men for roughly an hour, with a similar level of commitment from all squad members we would have beaten these and we really deserved a draw on the day. Special mention to Max who played out of position at right back and had a great game.
