After a comfortable win against Croft last week, this weeks game against Cricklade could have potentially been a banana skin for us, For all their hard work during the season this is the one game I was not looking forward to, reason being, very small pitch, small goals uneven pitch and 22 players packed all together and we always struggle on this pitch.

Right where do we start with this one, We gave the team our instructions, playing 3 up front, 4 in midfield and 3 at the back and to play the ball round on the deck to create chances for our forwards, In theory this should have worked and in the end it did, but sometimes the lads like to do it as always the hard way, and with Holland being a week away, some of them I thought had their eye on that, but fortunately the lads came through the game generally with out any injury scares and another 3 points.

To be fair the team never looked in any trouble of losing this game but at times made it hard work for themselves, the defence of Nashie, Seb and Grant did a great job today, with Grant sucking up most of the pressure and last ditch tackles with the support of Nashie and Seb managed to keep the other team at bay. Danny out on the wing had a blinding game today in both halves with his constant running and good flicks and crosses and never say die attitude was a great credit to him and will be missed in Holland. The forwards kept pressing the defenders and some good balls in from Ryan kept the momentum going but with some glaring misses and some great saves from the keeper kept the score going into half time Nil – Nil.

The pressure was more on Bassett than Cricklade today where we needed to win to maintain a 3-point lead; a draw was not good enough. Another chat with the lads at half time to see what more they could do to break the defence down and score the 1st important goal, yes the team in the 1st half did everything but score and played quite well so it was the final ball we needed to concentrate on.

The lads returned to the field, and then ko and as we were playing downhill we had the slight advantage, not much but a slight one, the team started to play better football now and with 15 mins to go Josh ran down the wing straight to the bi-line and crossed a inch perfect ball straight across the goal and for Callum to firmly plant the ball into the back of the net with his head to make it 1 nil. We thought this would gee us on more to score but before that we had a scare, within 5 mins Cricklade scored to make it 1 –1, a sloppy goal to concede but still a goal. 10 mins to go all square and we woke up a little, at times we need to know when to play nice football and when to put the ball straight up and over the oncoming forwards and midfield for our strikers to run onto and this is what happened. Grant had time to control the ball look up and lofted a perfect ball over their defence from his half and with the keeper rushing out to clear it and Callum rushing in the get it, it was looking a 50/50 ball but Callum just got to it and rolled the ball past the oncoming keeper to make it 2 –1 to Bassett and with minutes now to go Nashie running out of defence into midfield 4 players surrounded him and some how the ball stuck to his feet he jiggled and danced his way through them and played a perfect ball to Callum who made no mistake in making it 3 –1 to Bassett game over.

Overall, hard fought win, on a difficult pitch and another win for the team.

Well Done Again

And don't forget your Playing International friendlies next week enjoy yourselves.

Credit: Unknown
Last modified on Monday 28th December 2020 at 16:50