With Spencer failing a last-minute Fitness test and Brett failing the Oceana "Socks over the White Trainers" test on Friday, a reshuffled Boots defence produced a hardened 90 minutes of football to keep a competitive Plumtree side at bay. After some slapdash opening exchanges, Boots slowly began to pass the ball around and find the wings, and once a period of sustained pressure from Plumtree had been dealt with (helped in part by the lack of ball-control in the Plumtree attack), Boots hit them on the break with a text-book counter-attack. With the defence and midfield working well to break down the ball, Bally and Patto split the defence with 'darting' runs, spreading the Plumtree defence and creating the space for Man of the Match Rowan to run into and collect a perfectly-weighted ball from Pete, before finishing well beyond the untested keeper to claim his third of the season.
Minutes later another well-placed/lucky through-ball from Rob 'Tank' Brentnall allowed Bally to skip past the keeper and his marker, before being clipped on the heels as he aimed to shoot. The referee had no choice but to give a penalty, but chose to only book the defender as it wasn't a goal-scoring opportunity (he obviously knew that Bally would've missed). Pete stepped up with all the pomp of a Parisian dandy, and calmly stroked the ball into the net.
For the second half, Plumtree pushed a third man into the middle of midfield and began to take control of proceedings. Bally and Patto became a little isolated as Boots concentrated on clearing their lines, although a few attempts on goal were created as they held up the ball and forced chances that were well-saved from free-kicks, good low crosses and speculative long-range efforts (ahem). Chris Fletcher replaced Phil at left-back, Rich Tea came on for the injured Pete and Ian swapped from Simon. With Rowan also picking up a knock later on, Boots spent the latter stages of the match in their own half, clearing their lines and protecting Neil who really only had a few catches to manage.
In summary, I think the whole management team was really impressed with the commitment and energy that everyone showed throughout the match, hitting challenges with a fight that wasn't there last week - we may not have won every ball, but the number of fouls we won as Plumtree attempted to compete showed that they struggled to cope. The opposition also became frustrated with the lack of chances they were allowed, which shows how well the entire defence played, especially Paul Aplin who put in another strong and assured performance at the back partnering the consistent force that is Tank (who has played 10 games out of 10 so far this season - good commitment!) As usual there were sporadic periods of composed passing, but we need to produce more of these, particularly against the better teams. And Pete didn't win Man of the Match for the third week in a row either, so all-in-all it was a good day!
