Disputed penalty, and it wasn’t McDermont this time.
A solid performance, again, from Sassco against, arguably, the strongest team in the competition.
We were up against it and had three enforced changes, with Burns, Stanness and Middlemiss all out. In came Si Williamson, Dave Smith and John Devlin (at the 11th hour). Davey Lamb Chops was in goal, as I thought the priority would be to get the shaky McDermont pushed out of harms way on the right side of defence.
It started awkwardly. We were under quite a bit of pressure. Absolute Home Improvements were putting together some good moves, but we were weathering the storm in the storm. A little bit of a melee outside their area, saw a breakthrough and James Collinson scored his first goal for us, easily picking his slot and firing home.
After this, the problems started. We turned to see Dan Smith lying on the floor, apparently sunbathing, but realistically injured, or suffering shell shock from his snipering last week. We were down to 10 men. Then not long after this, a clean tackle by myself saw the referee call a foul and a penalty! I wasn’t devastated one bit as I and all the rest of the team (including Davey Pie Face, who’d be the first to slag me off) knew it was a good tackle and the ball spun off in the direction of where it was cleared.
It was 1-1 at half time, but we had the winds on our backs for the second. We still had 10 men, but were managing perfectly. My 17 year old tactics of defending deep, were finally coming back into fashion. We (or I) ignored Dixon’s obsession with a line up the field, because he likes his bike rides and is fitter than the rest of us if he has to get back. Defending deep meant that the closer the opponents got to goal, we stalled them to allow more men to ccome back and defend in numbers. The players were then in two minds to shoot, cross, pass and so on. Si, Gareth, Collinson and Devlin did superb in the middle, and despite being down to 10, we probably created the better chances: Three squandered free kicks in good areas, Barker’s open goal miss and then a hell of a goalmouth scramble, which didn’t result in anything.
Defensively, Dixon, Macca and Whelam (plus myself) were solid enough and Davey didn’t really have any major saves to make, although a lot of them he gathered easily.
A very impressive second game. Hopefully the same bunch can creak into game 3.
