DUNDONALD CHASE F.C.
NEWS ARCHIVE

10 April 2005 M&DSFL Div 9 at WIMBLEDON COMMON EXTENSIONS

DCFC 3 (2)
Ed 5, pen 15, Damion
Sutton Manor 5 (3)

So how do you sum up this performance, maybe in the same way you would sum up our season, this game typified, if not somewhat exaggerated our strengths and weaknesses. How many times have we stormed into a lead, onto to fizzle out, like a firework, full of spark and life in it's beginning, then fades and dies quicker than you can say "Where's your two goal lead gone?".

Sutton have generally enjoyed a successful season, but how much difference is there really between the two clubs, how much better are than they us. Is this comparison necessary you ask, well it may hurt to compare, but we have to be realistic if we don't want to endure the same sort of pain and suffering that we have this season, then we need to face the fact that there is a very fine line between winning and losing a game of football. One less mistake at the back and one more chance taken up front, would have seen this game finish 4-4. That may seem fairly obvious, but this has been the case virtually all season, with the exception of a couple of spankings at the hands of Mulladween (embarrassingly) and Chessington & Hook (more understandably).

Our start to this game, was a good bright one, it would seem that nearly half of the match reports written this season, have this in there somewhere. A bright start should have followed with a bright performance, after all we have every right to feel confident at the moment, we've just beaten division 6 leaders Kingsborough convincingly the week before. We can safely assume they didn't have their full strength team, but a result against any sort of weakened team that leads division 6 shows that we have bags of potential. A shear lack of belief was the single most obvious attribute to our game, the reasoning behind this goes unanswered.

Ed was bright eyed and bushy tailed for the first 15 minutes at least. A decent finish from the edge of the box with only minutes gone and then a cool confident placement of a spot kick, put us 2-0 up quicker than it takes Damion to park his car! So surely from this point we had every chance to push on and kill this game off. The only form of killing going on, was more attempted suicide. A kinda freaky Sutton opening goal, was followed by the usual lets drop our heads in despair ritual, this was followed by a confident offside protest by 2/3 players, which was fantastic for Curly up front, as the apparent disadvantage of having three defenders breathing down your neck, soon became no advantage, as he was allowed to run through, (while we hoped the decision would go our way) he then tucked the ball wide of a still heavily toxicated Geoff in goal. Then, suicidal defending (playing the ball around in our own penalty area) led to Sutton's third. It's unlikely that even the might of Brazil would attempt some of the things that we do! At this level, it's crazy, no team in the league, let alone our division, should play Russian Roulette in their penalty area ..... bang your dead!

With us trailing 3-2 at half-time, it was only some half-hearted yeah we can still win this game (with a real underlying tone of can we?) that gave us any encouragement to push on in the second half, but when Sutton got a fourth from a hopeful long range effort, it seemed all over, but we perhaps could sense the game wasn't over, when Damion showed us a bit of magic with a lob over the keeper, to reduce the deficit back to the single goal. At this point we seemed to react positively, but Sutton put an end to any hopes of a recovery with a fifth late on.

The game was generally a well tempered encounter, but a few individuals got, well let's say carried away. We now have to do the usual reflection thing at the end of the season. We all generally still believe that we've got a good season in us, but whether we can produce it, remains to be seen.