We faced a tough away day in the hospital grounds of St Otterans to face Villa today and came back home with three precious pts.
A frantic opening 10 minutes saw the home side get the better of us in the midfield department without creating too many opportunities. We grew into the game and most of our good play and creativity came from our left side with Evan and Ryan Carroll dominating their area.
We opened the scoring after 15 minutes when Evan turned his opponent and played a super ball through for Lee Tracey to finish calmly .
We started dominating possession for long periods and were unfortunate not to add 2 or 3 more goals before half time through some superb work from the midfield and delightful passing moves between Evan and Lee.
Second half saw the home team assert more pressure on us and forced us into long periods of defending on the edge of our own box.
The quality of defending was of the highest order and the second goal came from a brilliant piece of defending from James Delahunty. His clearance found Lee inside the Villa half and with 2 defenders around he seemed out of options until Jack Ryan raced past him and a perfectly weighted pass gave Jack the oppourtunity to slide the ball under the keeper for 2 nil.
The two goal cushion didn’t have the calming effect it should have had and our general play and work rate dropped a few levels .The continuing pressure from the home side yielded a goal to set up nervous last 15 minutes for us.
To be fair to the lads they showed great maturity in their defending and showed enough belief in their ability to get the win. With villa pushing for the equaliser they were leaving themselves vulnerable on the counter attack. We broke out quickly on several occasions only to be halted by the concession of frees to halt any momentum we were trying to build.
The third goal was scored by Lee Tracey when an unbelievably struck free from James took out the entire Villa team to put Lee into the box and his excellent first touch allowed him time and space to rifle his shot past the keeper to seal a 3-1 victory.
Decent performance to
to send us to the top of the table with just two games to play.
A big thanks to the huge number of parents who came along to support the lads again today .
It’s greatly appreciated by all involved in the group.