SUN 19 DEC 04
ST VALLIER 7
FRY CLUB COLTS
0
On
the last Sunday before the Christmas holidays, this was a fixture we would have
been happy to have had postponed due the bitterly cold weather. Nevertheless,
we went to
The
starting eleven virtually selected itself following their previous weeks performance with Reece Tucker replacing the absent
James Boulton the only change. For the first 20 minutes,
we matched everything St Vallier threw at us with
some controlled defending against a very strong team. Chances were created by
both teams but it was the home team that took the lead and, shortly after,
doubled their score, with 2 very well taken goals. Despite this, we still had
some very good defending by our 2 full backs Louis Nicholl
and Jordan Knight and we were playing to our strengths by moving the ball wide
to Reece Tucker and Kyle Curtis early which gave half chances to Brad Monelle, Mo Bouaziz and Oli Boon
during the first half. Perhaps with a little more strength, those half chances
could have been taken but we went into the half time break still very much in
the game.
Unfortunately
though, the start of the second half saw us conceed
early which effectively killed the game for us. That said,
we still had some good ball possession with both Matt Baber
and Nathan Dawson going very close to opening our account. The St Vallier keeper though was extremely competent, probably the
best keeper in our division, and he made sure they didn’t conceed.
Our keeper Craig Francis did his level best and, had he not made some good
saves in the first half, we could have easily lost by a lot more. Both James
Hurrell Smith and Michael Payne stood firm in defence and Oli
Randall had another good game up against 2 very tall central midfielders for Valliers. In the end though, we slightly lost our way and
it was a disappointing scoreline to finish with.
However, St Vallier are definitely the best team we
have come up against this season.
It’s
these games that bring out the character in a team when they are faced with
stiff opposition and we more or less coped. However, we can improve on our
attitude towards the defending side to our game which, at times, cost us a few
goals during this game.
For
todays Man of the Match, I have already mentioned a
few good performances but there was one player who came on at half time and
stuck to his instructions for the whole of the second half and really did play
to his potential, and that was Ben Bowden.
SQUAD:
Craig Francis, Kyle Curtis, James Hurrell-Smith, Michael Payne, Reece Tucker, Oli Randall, Matt Baber, Oli Boon, Mo Bouaziz, Brad Monelle,
Jordan Knight, Louis Nicholl, Ross MacLeod, Nathan
Dawson, Ben Bowden.