Buntingford Town U/18’s V’s Ipswich Wanderers U/18’s
Eastern Junior Alliance
Sunday 11th September 2005
In a challenging league fixture away to last seasons North East division champions, we had a slight set back before commencing our journey, with are main striker not showing up, while other absences were due to injury and part-time work. This left us with a squad of 12 from a registered 18 players. We set off for Buntingford with high expectations after a good performance against Felixstowe. The first-half saw Buntingford taking the initiative with a well constructed goal after 12min, beating the advancing keeper Richard Lynch. At the heart of the defence we had only can be described as a younger version of John Terry in Luke Reid and ably assisted by Matt Stott. Wanderers gradually started to show signs of threatening at the other end and by the end of the first-half was certainly a match for the home side.
HALF-TIME 1 – 0
The second saw us establish more control of the game, our level of fitness being a factor. The captain Sam O’Connor had woken as up to now he’d had a pretty quiet game. A self belief that something could be had from the game, with intermittent spells of the Referee not taking general control and allowing some minor incidences off the ball to go unpunished. All the players started to work hard for each other. Ashley Rankin had earlier received his first caution for supposed comments made to the referee and it was only after Matt Wilson had been felled by an innocuous challenge that Ashley’s late tackle was deemed a second offence and a red card back to the changing rooms. As we had already used up our one sub Michael Garvin, John McRoberts had to soldier on, and it was in the last few minutes we had the chance of salvaging a point. When Sam O’Connor missed a glorious chance after creating something out of nothing and failed to get a positive side foot to the ball into the net. It is the second match where it was not to be. Lets hope we get a striker and a result at home to Stansted next week.
