We played against a young and organized Malays time after a one week mandatory break. There was a late kick-off as the Referee shown up extremly late.
For once we had a longer than usual pre-match warming up and briefing. The message to the team was to play like what we did against Team Synergy.
Jansen returned to th eteam after a long break (Think its more than 3 years). We managed to convince him to return to football after downing him with 3 bottles of whiskey during SK's wedding party. Lots of crazy stuffs happened during the party and the most bizarre things that happened was Lawrence sold Harold to the Hibs for a bottle of Nikka. That's the cheapest football tranfers deal that ever happened in football history.
This was the team that played on Saturday:-
In goal: Ben
Defence: Jiunn / SK / Roger / Jerome
Midfield: Daryl / Harold / Clarence / Lawrence / Richard
Striker: Yew Boon
You can see that Harold was still in the team, that because he has not cleared the international transfer paperworks in time to play for Hibs last week.
The game finally got underway after a long wait. Our team started nervously and it was quite unrecognizable from the previous team that dominated and defeated Team Synergy. Our dreadful organization in the middle of the park resulted in the opposition taken over control in midfield. We were caught out of position and that costed us dear. We conceded our first goal as early as the 8th minutes.
I was forced to make my first substitution because we were clealy overrun in midfield. Jansen came on for Clarence to provide more coverage to the back two. The move worked and we managed to extert our authority back in the middle. Stan soon came in for Jansen as the pace of the game overcame him after being out for a long time away from football. In this half, we had a few chances but again we were not clinical enough to cause any trouble to The Chosen Ones.
Half time team talk was about reflecting what went wrong in the first and to regroup for the second. The message was to get back to basic and let our game flow.
We started the second half strongly, pinning back the opponent with our dominance play. The pressing was a joy to watch and we should have started like that in the first half. Our equalizer goal came in the 45th minutes. I missed the build up play leading to the goal but the end product was converted by Henry.
The defending in this half was good. The back 4 along with the midfielders was doing a excellent job breaking down attacks and defending as a unit. Bee was again outstanding continuing from the last game. His game seems to flourish when the defensive unit was playing tight and compact. He was my choice for MoM this week.
We conceded a second goal late in the second half. The communcications at the back was poor, the defence should have dealt with the harmless crossed better. The ball was cleared tamely and it felt kindly to their forward. He took a tame short that somehow bubbled over the line. Ben was caught out of position at that moment.
We ended the game 1-2 playing only 35 minutes in the second half.
Hopefully we will have a better game next week.
Thanks.
