Match Report

A busy week with the Senior Vets team as roles & responsibilities changed hands rather abruptly, but the team will ‘Carry on Regardless’ just like that famous movie. Now, for those that don’t remember this classic movie from 1961, basically a team is set up aiming to come to the rescue of people with unusual problems. Needless to say, they manage to get into plenty of scrapes during the course of their jobs, which include walking a chimpanzee (Sniper for all his monkeying around?), modelling underwear (Manty?) and guarding the employees of a strip club (Jay?). It might be a good idea to match some of the characters from this movie to some of our team – Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Conner, Sid James, Charles Hawtrey & Hattie Jacques …. to name a few.

FOBG Squad: Phil Anthony, Gordon Thomson, Colin Mant, Waine Hetherington, Peter Harvey, George Kleanthous, Sinisa Gracanin, Kypros Michael, Jay Hardy, Joe Skinner, Simon Thomas, Michael Hills,Tom Girling, Chisa Mkala, Jon Redman

Referee: No idea

Kit sponsor: The Dog and Duck, Outwood

Manager:  George Kleanthous

Interim Chief Football Correspondent:  Phil Anthony

Chief Impact Officer:  Phil Anthony

Before the kick off, the referee made it very clear who was in charge. He spoke to both captains and linesmen, he didn’t really want any linesman as he didn’t trust anyone to keep up with play (he could do this by himself) and wanted to avoid conflicts between teams. No back chat, his decision final etc etc.

We all felt that we should have easily won this match and there were 4 reasons why we didn’t – the ref, their linesman, their keeper and our finishing.

The ref looked the part, dressed smartly, very clear on his decisions and kept referring to VAR for some of his decisions. He actually booked one of their players and our Golden Boot Kyp – apparently for moaning about being dragged down by one of their players (who actually admitted it). A first for the Senior Vets team, I believe and wonder if there is a club process to deal with this – a fine maybe?

Their linesman gave an offside for a goal we scored and it took the ref (who didn’t keep up with play BTW) a while before he made his decision – offside; goal disallowed. Their linesman said there were none of his players keeping our player onside, but CLEARLY, they had a player on the line.

Their keeper made a string of fine saves to keep us from producing a fine win instead of a 1-1 draw. Unfortunately, an incident between Peter and the keeper meant that the ref had to call in 2 players to calm the situation down – Peter & Hillsy. OMG if only he knew!!!

On another day, we would have scored 5 or 6 goals and we really need to be more clinical. Not sure blasting the ball towards goal is the best approach for a one-on-one with the keeper, maybe a placed shot in one of the corners OR even just a quick look up to see if another player has a better chance of scoring …#tag-just-saying, as I’m no goal scorer, obviously.

The whole team played really well together again, but sometimes we did rush our passing and kept losing the ball. George’s ethos is definitely working – "Trust your touch", "Shorten the game", "Play out from the back"and our results have shown this – W3, D3. We created so many chances, so we know we will score goals.

Their goal was a very neat finish from the striker from outside our box and I think Tom may have seen this late due to the number of bodies impairing his vision.

Our goal wasn’t a classic as the ball bounced around their area and ping ponged between players, but I am informed that Kyp did score after the ball ricocheted off his knee – I could be wrong though.

Man-of-the-match:  2 players shared the votes for MOM – George & Sini (5 & 9 respectively).