A very cold and windy Ballards Ash was the venue for today′s match against Wroughton and again we expected this to be another tough match.

Bassett started the game as though they meant business with two early chances, Reuben was the first player to test the Wroughton keeper with a good long range shot and Josh also went close hitting the post with a quick first time shot after a good early pass from Max made the chance. Then with around ten minutes on the clock Mitchell made a great save which he followed up with fantastic distribution out to Reuben who sent Max sprinting away down the wing, Max took on and beat his marker and hit a good shot which the keeper managed to save but Josh was on it like a shot and finished convincingly to open the scoring. We nearly made it two five minutes later when Reuben curled in a good cross which Josh met well with his head to beat the keeper but unfortunately the ball came back off the bar and nobody reacted quickly enough to put away the rebound. Then just before half time came the best goal of the match, Josh won the ball in the Bassett half and played the ball out wide to Max who breezed past two Wroughton defenders before hitting a low powerful shot past the keeper and into the bottom corner to send us into half time 2-0 up.

At half time we made a few positional changes which did upset our rhythm and we didn′t look quite as threatening as we had in the first half. Josh, Reuben, Mitchell and Alex all had chances before Alex won the ball with a good solid tackle and played Reuben into space, he spotted Josh in the area and fed the ball in, Josh then rounded the keeper to slot the ball into an empty net to make the final score 3-0 to Bassett.

Even though this won′t go down as our best performance of the season we looked good at times and the passing and movement was still quite good, we also switched the play really well on several occasions which was nice to see as we have spent a lot of time working on this in training. On the critical side we didn′t take advantage of the wide pitch and looked very narrow at times and I also felt we could have closed the opposition down a little quicker. Mitchell again made a couple of important saves and again distributed the ball very well; Tom, Martin and Scott looked pretty comfortable at the back and also brought the ball out well when needed. In midfield Max had a very good first half and his decision making was good today, his early passes into the danger area helped to put Wroughton under a lot of pressure and created some good goal scoring opportunities, whilst he also took the opposition on at the right times and this resulted in his well taken goal, Reuben had his typical tough tackling, no nonsense game and Alex worked hard and created a lot of chances. Up front Josh′s link up play was very good today and he also took his two goals well which earned him MOTM.

MOTM – Josh Bolton

Credit: Unknown
Last modified on Saturday 26th December 2020 at 14:47