8 January 2006 M&DSFL Div 9 at Sir Joseph Hood, Motspur Park AFC Links 3 DCFC 2 Dave 2 by Matty Aitken

 

 

 

 

 

The first game since Christmas and as if all the Christmas pudding wasn’t hindering us enough as it was, we only had 10 players.

The game started brightly with us knocking the ball about well around the stodgy pitch. We surprised ourselves with how well we had started and so were shocked when it was us who opened the scoring with Dave (or was that their defender?) beating the keeper from inside the area.

Finding ourselves one up and with 10 men seemed to put us in more hesitant mood playing deep in our own half. Some fantastic defending, notably from Wayne and Garry kept us in the lead but it certainly didn’t look like we were going to add any more goals to our tally.

But then Darren Anderton, sorry Dave, scored an absolute scorcher from about three miles out. Oh yeah, and it was with his left foot. It looked like a pretty redundant attack when we broke with only three players past the half way line but Dave done well to hold onto the ball. It looked like he was going nowhere until he unleashed a looping shot into the keeper’s top left corner. Although the goal may have been fantastic the celebration definitely was not as Dave ran halfway up the pitch rallying for freedom Braveheart style.

We managed to stick out the second half putting in a battling performance but we all knew the second half was going to be the real test. And a real test it was as Links deficit was reduced to one goal swiftly with the ball gliding past Rob in goal after what looked a harmless attack.

Defence was now our only option. Although we did look dangerous on the attacks we had they were scarce enough for AFC Links not to have any real worries. Their equaliser soon arrived when their forward found a way through our defence and just beat Rob to the ball knocking it past him to put the scores level.

Now we had a battle on our hands. Up until the last ten minutes it looked like a point would soon be ours but somewhere near the 80 minute mark their forward (who couldn’t hit a barn door throughout most of the game) finished neatly in off the post after some suspect defending from us.

Our spirit remerged for the remainder of the game as we pushed for the equaliser but we lacked a killer touch that we, or more accurately Dave possessed in the first half. Full time saw us disappointed but we all knew maximum effort had been put in. If only we had 11 men.