After the excitement of last Sundays cup game, this one was always going to be an anticlimax even against a struggling Pirates reserves team who were anchored at the bottom of Division 3.
Despite a couple of injuries and unexplained absences, Manager Godfrey was still able to assemble a strong team and confidence was high asPlumtree looked to extend their unbeaten run.
Unfortunately, the team started poorly with a number of players clearly struggling with late nights and raging hangovers. After dominating the early exchanges, Pirates took the lead and were unlucky not to finish the half at least 5 goals ahead. Roscoe had a fantastic first half and made a number of one on one saves to keep the score at one nil when the break came.
After possibly the worst first half of the season in terms of performance, application and end result, Manager Godfrey brought on Ryan who’d spent the first half meandering around the pitch doing a vaguely passable impression of a referee..
Even after a strong half time team talk, Plumtree conceded the obligatory early second half goal. A misunderstanding in the defence let in the Pirates striker to score a simple tap in and once again Plumtree were behind with 30 minutes to play.
After a good period of attacking football, the ball was passed to Ryan on the right wing who looked up and aimed a cross at the back post. Quite who he was aiming for we’ll never know but luckily his cross landed perfectly in the top left hand corner of the Pirates goal, giving the keeper no chance,2-1 and Plumtree were back in the game.
With 15 minutes to go, top scorer Omar once again found the back of the net to continue his impressive record of scoring in every game this season. An excellent cross from Ryan was expertly volleyed into the bottom corner to level the scores at 2-2.
To be honest, we were pretty much outplayed for good chunks of the game and a draw was a good result under the circumstances.
To reiterate what Toz said at half time, we’ll not win the league if we can’t beat teams like Wollaton and we all need to raise our games if we’re to be challenging at the end of the season.
The man of the match was Roscoe for making numerous crucial saves despite a lack of sleep the night before.
Match report by Jon Atkin
