In what was always going to be a tough game against a team that were unbeaten and leading the Premier Division, Haddonfield gave a good account of themselves and could leave the field without feeling too disheartened, even though Sabanoh had put 7 past them.
With only 11 players available due to injuries and illness, returns in defence for Adam Pantelli, Brad Davis and up front for GJ Mulgrew were very welcomed, but the side went in to the game missing key players in top scorer Stuart Lee and top assist provider Rob Savage, through knee and hamstring injuries respectively.
The game started with Sabanoh unsurprisingly dominating possession and playing some very nice football, with Haddonfield doing well to soak up the pressure. An early defensive mistake from Sabanoh sent Chris Willis through on goal but his touch was a bit heavy and the chance lead to nothing. GJ attempted to test the Sabanoh ‘keeper with an attempted chip from 30 yards that looked dangerous as it left his boot but unfortunately ended up getting caught in the wind and dropping tamely into his arms.
Sabanoh continued to play a very impressive passing game and had created a few good chances but a combination of poor finishing, dogged defending and some impressive goalkeeping from Sam Hollands had kept the scoreline at 0-0.
Although chances were hard to come by, Haddonfield were playing some good football. On one or two occasions, a bad choice or badly played final ball ended what looked like promising attacks for the away side. You certainly wouldn’t have stood on the sidelines and thought this was a match between two sides that were so far apart in divisional standings.
Just after the half hour mark, the inevitable happened. For perhaps the first time in the game, a Sabanoh player was allowed far too much time on the edge of the box and duly despatched the ball in to the top left corner of the goal to make it 1-0.
Although you may get away with it in Division Two, you can’t get away with not shutting down a man on the edge of the box against teams from the Premier Division and it was the same story as Sabanoh scored quickfire goals from outside the box to make it 3-0 at half time, the 3rd taking a wicked deflection and wrong-footing Sam Hollands in the Haddonfield goal.
In to the second half and it was a case of the same story again for goals 4 and 5 with both coming from strikes outside the box, where absolutely no pressure was applied to the player taking the shot and again another nasty deflection on the 5th goal giving Sam Hollands no chance.
To say that your keeper had been absolutely brilliant at 5-0 down would generally be laughed at, but it would not be an overstatement as Sam Hollands pulled off brilliant save after brilliant save and prevented at least 3 shots from finding the top corner. You could not blame him for any of the goals and after a shaky game last week, he was definitely back on form.
Again, Haddonfield had moments of very good football and broke well on occasions but – as in the first half – the killer final ball just always seemed to elude them.
With the game drawing to an end and the 11 players beginning to feel the strain of chasing the ball for large parts of the game, Sabanoh – who had the luxury of having 3 subs to make and even leave one unused - struck 2 more times.
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Very pleased with the performance from the lads, although it is never good to lose 7-0, we have lost by this scoreline to the best team in the whole Alliance and can take a lot of positives from the game.
Having Brad and Adam back made us look so much more solid in defence then we did last Sunday and – with all respect to Olympic Greenwich – the fact we conceded the same amount of goals to Sabanoh as we did last week just shows how much we missed those two.
The effort from all the boys was brilliant and I can not fault anyone in that sense. One or two were off colour but I'd rather it be this week against Sabanoh than in a league game.
Now that Sabanoh is out of the way, we can look forward to facing another Premier Division side this week! These cup draws don’t get much better for us do they?
