Div 5 vs Warnbro

25 July 2011 Written by HRSC

The team had a long road trip to Warnbro on the weekend to play a fixture that has had its moments in recent meetings, The guys were keen to overturn their earlier league result when we lost 6-1, well we improved marginally as we only lost this game 5-1!

On what can only be described as a disgrace for a pitch (could’ve sworn I saw cows grazing on it earlier in the day) we had our work cut out for us. Warnbro obviously were more used to playing on the bumpy surface and they controlled the ball well, whereas we had all sorts of trouble coming to terms with it and barely put two or three passes together.

The first half could best be remembered for all the missed chances that both teams suffered. Warnbro had more of them and on numerous occasions Rovers had to scramble the ball away from goalmouth skirmishes. Daniel came to our rescue on a few occasions with some reflex saves, as Rovers struggled to put any meaningful forward moves together.                                

We did have two glorious chances to take the lead just before the break. Adam, who had been chasing lost causes for most of the half, chased down two Warnbro defenders and won the ball. He immediately crossed to unmarked Tony who could only scoop the ball over the bar from about 5 yards, when a simple tap-in was all that was required. Moments later, as if to redeem himself, Tony won the ball out on right and delivered an excellent cross into the box. Justin rose between two Warnbro defenders and met the ball with his head, but could only steer it wide.             

So 0-0 at the break and although Rovers had been under a lot of pressure, we were still in it.               

We needed to start well in the second half and try to wrestle the ascendancy back from Warnbro and hopefully capitalise on whatever chances we could create. But alas it was Warnbro who decided to up the tempo and they went ahead within 5 minutes of the restart.

From this point, Warnbro started to dominate the midfield and they always seemed to have an extra man to pass to. They seemed to have plenty of numbers in the middle and their dominance paid off when they scored three goals in quick succession to lead 4-0 and kill off the game as a contest, with still 20 minutes to go.

I decided to try and mix things up a bit, so Boris went up front which allowed Tony to drop back into midfield and it seemed to help for a while as Tony , Pat and OJ were now seeing more of the ball. Just when I thought we might pull a goal back, Warnbro rubbed more salt into the wound by scoring again.          

I brought Skip on up front (replacing Boris) to see if he could conjure something up. Daryl also came off to allow Kim into the middle and later on OJ limped off for Masih. In the end Skip did have the last say when he took advantage of some poor positioning by Warnbro’s keeper and posted Rover’s only goal of the game.

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