DUNDONALD CHASE F.C.
NEWS ARCHIVE

25 April 2004 Morden & District League Division 8 at Morden Road Recreation Ground

DCFC 1 (1)
Damion 6
Kingsway 3 (2)
22,39,83

So that's it, the 2003/2004 season is over and our plight is confirmed, we finish bottom of division 8. Looking back on the matches we've played and lost, quite a number of them saw us go a goal in front, only to miss out on 3 points. Kingsway are a prime example of how we have failed to kill games off. Three meetings, three defeats and yet all of them we were a goal in front and of course the last meeting in the Hickey Cup, saw us chuck away a two goal advantage.

This encounter saw nothing change, we got off to a bright start, some of the passing was impressive, especially when you bear in mind that both sides were hampered by a rather heavy pitch, Merton have obviously given up preparing the pitches this season! Our bright start reaped early rewards as Damion's cool touch brought him his eighth goal of the season. Good news for Damion is he wins the golden boot award for the season, he'll have to wait to see if he can walk away with the main prize as well. From this point we could have nearly killed the game off. Leroy seemed to freeze in front of goal, when Dave playing in his debut, put him through with the goal gaping. Damion created other chances which unfortunately didn't come off. The biggest problem we have is we're playing possession football quite well, but don't make it count and then get punished at the other end. This game had that written all over it, to be fair this season has had that written all over it, typified further by Tom getting caught out at the back and Kingsway taking full advantage and going somewhat undeservedly level.

The game was semi-killed off when Kingsway got their second Richie (standing in for our absent keepers) made the initial save, but the Kingsway forwards pounced to follow up the scraps.

Despite being a goal down, we weren't going to give up the cause. We saw the return of Tim, who came on for Dave. His hung his boots up many times in his illustrious career, his new one's obviously came with no goal scoring guarantee, as late on he was put clean through and he, err, missed completely!

Kingsway used their favourite tactic to, to intimidate the opposition and the referee and it seemed to almost work (almost as we didn't fall for it), winging when they had a goal disallowed in the first half for a straightforward offside, minutes later we should have had a penalty when Ed was brought down inside the area, somehow a free kick was awarded. The ref obviously felt the pressure of disallowing their effort and then awarding us with a pen. To be fair, given our poor record from the spot, we would have probably missed it anyway!

How the referee tolerated so much abuse is strange. Had Mr. Povey refereed this game, it would have been interesting to see how many cards were shown. The encouraging thing from our perspective is that we were mentally up for the challenge, no one seemed to lose their bottle and despite having a scratch side, we still managed to make a game of it.

This game was always all about pride as we would have had to have won 5-0 to avoid finishing bottom and that was never realistically on. We shall have to wait to see if it is going to be division 9 or 10 next season, of course there may well not be a division 10, so we may have another season in the bottom division, but that might not be a bad thing.