Versus Timmy Mac's Allstars - 10/11/09

Reserves aim to bounce back following last week’s debacle. Timmy Mac’s are a couple of places above us in the table so this is a must win.

Rocko is a loss this week, not so much for his footballing or goalkeeping ability (or lack of) but he was the contact for many of the reserve players.

I am thinking that we should be ok though.

Squad for tonight is as follows:

Bandage
Tinnion
Farmer
Smelly
therock66
Gar
Larryduff

and possibly ClarkeyCat.

Drew 1-1 tonight in a pretty crap game. 1-0 up at half time after their 'keeper spilled a larryduff driven cross into his own goal. Then conceded halfway through the second half from a deflection which looped into the top corner.

Are your defenders shite at crossing down and tackling bandage because the amount of deflected goals you concede is unnatural…

It’s more of a fatigue thing, I suppose. Tendency to drop deeper as we collectively get more tired. And when you’re not right in a lad’s face to get a full block on a shot then there’s a greater chance you’ll dangle out a leg and get a nick on the ball. Plus the deeper the defenders are, the more unsighted the keeper is and the less time he has to react to a deflection. As you know, there’s no way of beating me other than deflections.

We could really do with scoring more goals. A goal a game will win you nothing in astro. The odd thing is that we seem to concede very few goals without defending well either. Bandage will say much of that is down to him and maybe it is but we really do play far, far too deep sometimes in the reserve league. Need to bring some of the fluidity and movement from the elite Thursday team into the kids’ team.

Still a draw isn’t too bad a result. There were probably no youth players on the opposition.

That is harsh. The goal last night actually deflected off two of us. A freak goal really - which was similar to ours in all honesty. I would say that a draw was a fair result although we probably had the superior chances.

In the last year I would say that we conceded three deflected goals max so in the words of Eamo Dunphy:

‘You get your facts straight’.

[quote=“Rocko”]We could really do with scoring more goals. A goal a game will win you nothing in astro. The odd thing is that we seem to concede very few goals without defending well either. Bandage will say much of that is down to him and maybe it is but we really do play far, far too deep sometimes in the reserve league. Need to bring some of the fluidity and movement from the elite Thursday team into the kids’ team.

Still a draw isn’t too bad a result. There were probably no youth players on the opposition.[/quote]

Agree here.

As we were coming off the pitch last night I heard a member of the opposition remark to his team mates - ‘Jaysus they played really deep. It was impossible to break them down’.

That is all very well but in the end we were launching it to Clarkey attempting to get him away over the top where he had little or no support from midfielders.

The ridiculous thing about it was though that we had two subs last night and there were lads out there clearly fucked and dropping back into defence because they were unable to get up and down.

Disagree with Farmer here. We concede a load of deflected goals - there was a period towards the end of the summer league where every second goal we let in was a deflection. So was the first goal last Thursday and the only goal last night. I wouldn’t have said we were all that hard to break down either - just that they missed a lot of chances last night.

The reports above don’t actually say who the ball deflected off but I’m going to make an informed guess at it and say it was Farmer.

Drop Farmer.

It was clarkey cat who ‘got’ our deflected goal last night and not me. Bandage is probably confusing with my goal couple of weeks back. We do defend too deep with forwards isolated. As regards subs its quite easy to forget who has gone off or what position subs are for and to generally get caught up in game and not come off. Thats my excuse anyway for my late substitution.