Match Report

Senior Vets Outdone by Whippersnappers

Second game into the season and a bit early to be scrabbling around for players for my liking. We had a squad of 13 on Friday but by lunchtime Saturday this was down to the bare 11 and my afternoon was taken up with looking for loans from the Young Vets who were unable to oblige due to their own reduced numbers and ringing all and sundry to ensure we had at least one sub. As it was Waine came up trumps as he recruited two from his Saturday Bow Street Runners team in Phil Anthony (who had helped us out last in December) and Jim Grimley and thanks to both for coming along at short notice.

With Erith playing in canary yellow we opted to use our dark blue kit to avoid any clash of colours and lined up as follows:

Gary – GK
Phil Anthony – RB
Colesy – CB
Steve B – CB
Colin B – LB
Simon Thomas – RM
Nick – CM
Rob – CM
Colin M – CM
Waine – LM
Compo – CF

Subs:

Jim Grimley
Rog

Referee: Mick Gearing

The game was again late in kicking off as nobody had thought to bring up the flags and water bottles. It was watched at different points by Thomas French, Louie Dwight, Jane, Vicky, Rebecca Coles, Mick O’Flynn (injured), Sinisa Gracanin (injured) and Ian Lyons (injured) who witnessed another disjointed dismal performance.

The plan this week was to play with a back four with Nick taking on the position in front of the back line seeing as Lionel Lyons had pulled a calf muscle 10 minutes into his Saturday game leading to his withdrawal. The defence would be further protected by Colin the Aardvark together with The Hulk Lipscomb (who turned a bit green after a coming together midway through the half) with Simon and Waine up and down the wings feeding lone striker Compo – at least that was the plan and we know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men.

As it was it began to unravel fairly swiftly as once again we couldn’t quite get to grips with the basics of closing players down in the middle. Needless to say we conceded 3 goals in the first half with a fair amount of contributory negligence I would say. I ‘m not really going to add much more to this report but suffice to say I wasn’t happy with proceedings and half-time proved to be an agitated debate on how best to line-up for the second half. The only change that was made was that Phil took the linesman’s flag for the start of the second half.

We did play better in the second half and had Erith pushed back in their half for lengthy periods and caused them to get edgy with each other. Early pressure paid off as Colin M went down following a hefty shove in the back in the penalty area leading to Mick giving his second penalty in as many weeks. Compo duly despatched the penalty having sent the keeper the wrong way. This gave us a bit of hope that we might get going and pull something out of the bag but it was short lived.

Although we were now taking the game to Erith this did leave us vulnerable at the back particularly as they had a rather speedy whippersnapper at 16 (shirt number and possibly age) up front and another midfield dynamo who took exception to playing against "old" men (there’s a clue in the title – FOBG Senior Vets) or at least being fouled by an "old" man. The inevitable happened as Erith picked up two more goals to put a gloss on the score line.

Positives from the second half were we scored a goal and we did play better but the damage was already done as we lost for the second week running. No doubt co-manager Waldorf will be reading this again whilst on the throne – at least he can flush we are stuck with this performance once again.

Next week we will be missing a couple of players from today but should see the return of three that were absent from today’s game. The post-match pizzas and garlic bread were supplied and prepared by Jane and we were almost outstayed by a core of Erith Vets players in the bar. Man of the match votes were again well spread through the team but the deserved winner was Colin Brazier.

Onto next week and another home game against CUACO – let’s just hope we don’t produce another load of guano.