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YC&AC Sunday 20th April,
YCAC breezed past a depleted Geckoes team in a somewhat meaningless end of season game in what might yet prove to be the last TML1 fixture at YCAC played on grass. Just dont put your mortgage on it
With a gale force wind blowing directly down the pitch the thing of it seemed to be either to get it down and play or to use route 1 stuff and take full advantage of the 40 minutes you had defending the Bowling Green End. The puzzle within the conundrum was, of course, that "getting it down and playing" is easier said than done at YCAC and its so tempting to put your foot through the ball and transfer the issue to your opponents penalty area asap
When all's said and done, neither team took advantage of the wind at their backs and both, in fact, played their better football when they had to endure the same blowing into their faces.
Dickie Philo won the toss, and headed home YCACs 2nd while we are about it, and the home side took the wind 1st half. As the visitors would also discover in the 2nd stanza if you were going to play the ball forwards you either had to hit your team mates feet or you may as well shoot no matter from where. If the ball ran past attacker or defender it was going for a goal kick or straight to the keeper. No one was going to be quick enough to catch a through ball
I would dearly like to take credit for devising this strategy but it only actually strikes me now, as I type. As they do in rugby, when youre short of attacking inspiration, punt the ball to their last defender and gain a bit of territory. In football with the wind in the opposition Goalies face give him the ball and then watch him struggle to clear it effectively. Thats how, by accident rather than design, YCAC got the opener. WSGs stopper, Rob Keyworth, was caught out of his goal after trying to play the ball out via his full back. The ball only reached Joe Takeda who sidefooted it back 25 yds. Wind assisted; the ball outpaced the retreating Rob and rolled agonizing into goal
1-0. 2-0 we've done already and its half time. Was it enough of an advantage to face the wind with in the 2nd half or would the boys in gun metal grey with navy trim regret wasting all those corners and not taking more shots at goal?
Yes, more than enough as the Geckoes failed to take advantage of the conditions and in fact posed very little threat to the YCAC goal at all. It was the latter that scored next actually, top scorer Hide Yoshioka ramming home the rebound after debutant Koikes shot was cleared off the line. 3-0 is a lead that has been lost before and sure enough the Geckoes only real attack was enough to spark 5 minutes of panic in the home teams ranks. A shot on goal was parried around the post by the other debutant Mike Butler, YCACs 5th GK in 16 TML games alone. The resulting corner ruined Mikes otherwise faultless debut somewhat by flying untouched over his head into the opposite corner of the net
3-1 and more WSG pressure on its way. Seemingly the only way YCAC can defend a 3 goal lead is to score a 4th and that was the way of it. A weakly cleared Geckoes corner fell to Hide on the edge of his own box. He set off and didnt stop until he reached his opponents area. He laid the ball off to Mikey Taw` who nudged it through to Koike to finish with aplomb. 4-1; Game over and just a few minutes to kill by winding each other and the Ref up. The banter was, unfortunately, every bit as unoriginal and uninspiring as most the football played before it
Report by Steve Taw
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