3s lose to Banbury

We had a strong side this week for the arrival of Banbury and proved this in a strong first 20 minutes where we had most of the possession and a host of short corners. One of these, with a massive golf swing from the returning Matt Lock, got all the way through to the goal line where it was picked by a Banbury defender – to be fair, it had lost most of its power by this stage. The fact we hadn’t scored and a round of substitutions allowed Banbury to get back into the game in the latter part of the half. Now, I had heard Jacob and Billy talking about cricket nets in the warm up and, true to form, Billy was caught “flapping outside off stump” (right post) at a short corner and managed to turn an off target shot into an on target one to leave us one down at half time.

Now, I am going to have to work on my half time team talks, as what followed was truly dreadful. We completely went to sleep for the first 15 minutes of the second half and Timmy rightly pointed out we didn’t even get in their half for ages. The Banbury centre mid was running the show, especially from their long corners and they created more pressure and a growing tally of shorts, one of which left Sam on the floor wailing as he got caught on his Prince Albert. Pondy was keeping us in the game but was powerless when Luke lost the ball trying to dribble out of defence and we got punished. We finally woke up, started attacking and looking like we wanted it but, despite getting a couple of saves out of the keeper didn’t break our 2019 scoring duck

Bring on South Berks

MOTM Pondy
Sore DOTD Sam