Gary's View
Home to Truro
Posted by Webmaster
Jan 25, 2010, 13:42

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Clearly it’s disappointing to lose our unbeaten home record, but it was always going to be an uphill task after we were reduced to 10 men.

Before the match, we lost Tony Burke, and with it lost a lot of pace in the team. Tony will probably be out for the Stourbridge game on Tuesday too, so the dimension of the team will be pretty much the same for that game as it was on Saturday. There were also a couple of players feeling the effects of the busy midweek programme, especially the extra time played at Woodford on Wednesday night.

With the first goal, it was disappointing as I think Dave Theobald should have dealt with it better and cleared it before they got into a goal scoring position. The nature of the goal in the sense of how it was deflected in was poor too, but these things happen and you just have to accept it.

So we were chasing the game against a decent Truro side, and I felt going into half-time that there wasn’t a great deal in it. Indeed, looking back on it, we had a goal disallowed so the lads had put in an excellent work rate during the first part of the match and they were feeling a bit aggrieved that they were losing at the interval.

At half-time, we lost Jamie Barker with a hamstring strain. He could be out for up to two weeks too, so we lost a bit of an attacking threat with his absence.

Then of course our task was compounded further with the sending off. There is no real complaints as Lee had been booked already and was actually red carded for using foul and abusive language as opposed to his second challenge. I thought their guy put the penalty away well, and gave Zac no chance. He’s saved a number of penalties for us and it is too much to ask him to keep repeating the feat. Without checking I’m guessing that Lee will be out for possibly just one game, which may be the clash at home to Bashley in a fortnight.

Following the sending off we tried to re-group, but we had a mountain to climb with a jaded team, ten men, and a 2 goal deficit.

Their 3rd goal came as a result of getting behind us on the right hand side, which wasn’t the first time it had happened during the afternoon, and clearly when that went in Truro had got the win.

Although we were well below par, you have to give Truro credit. They have a new manager who has injected some fresh impetus into the squad, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t kick on and make a challenge for the play-offs. They certainly did their homework on us, and stifled us in some respects and didn’t allow us to play our natural passing game. But the lads gave their all, even with 10 men and no one let us down it was just a big off day for us.

With Stourbridge on Tuesday, we are definitely without Tony Burke and Jamie Barker. Stourbridge are a direct side and are decent and once again we have to be on our guard. We do need to be a lot sharper in all areas if we are to get a result.

In terms of numbers, I am still looking to bring in striker Ricky Miller who I made an approach for before Christmas, so I’ll see what happens there. With the amount of postponements, we have a busy programme coming up and it will be a big test for the squad I have at my disposal to see if they can get the results to maintain our promotion push.


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