THE EDMONTON ROVERS FORUM
We easily fielded a squad of 8 for this week's match against League leaders Wood Green Old Boys even though we were missing Alan Barnard, Jim Arrowsmith, Rob Brown & Stuart Dorward, all of whom we had wanted to include due to the fact that Wood Green Old Boys had won all four of their matches so far and scored an average of 10.5 goals a game !!!
We therefore had to make do with Jacko in goal, Ollie Tedder and Terry Moore in defence, Kris Spyrou, Danny Hagan & Danny Smith in midfield and Tem Adil up front to start the match with, with Loveday as sub because he had 'had a bad day at work', but Tem had stood on a nail at his place of work during the day and was not 50% fit, let alone 100.
Predictably, Wood Green O.B.'s got on top straight away and they took the lead after 5 minutes when Jacko was lobbed from two yards !
They then made it 2-0 in the 12th minute with half our players giving up, bollocking each other and then asking to be substituted straight away. When they saw me going over to the kit bag to put a shirt on though, they soon changed their minds, but the rest of the First Half continued in the same vein and it was only some good saves by Jacko that kept us in the game and saw us come off at the break only 2-0 down.
We then decided to put Loveday up front instead of Tem for the whole of the Second Half and we played much better as a result, with Danny Hagan pulling a goal back with a good low shot just a minute after the break. Wood Green O.B's were still the better side but we certainly competed well and gave them a few scares at the back, but they went 3-1 up half-way through the Second Half just seconds after Tem had come on as a sub for Kris and didn't react to a midfielder running in behind him.
However, Danny Smith pulled another goal back with about 7 minutes remaining to make it 3-2 and when Wood Green O.B.'s keeper was blue-carded and sin-binned a couple of minutes later for deliberate handball outside the area to stop Loveday 'scoring ?', we had a real chance of snatching an unlikely draw at least. However we missed a couple of reasonable chances and then let in a terrible goal a couple of minutes from time to give our opponents a 4-2 victory as our three supposed 'best players' Terry Moore, Danny Smith & Danny Hagan all gave the ball away with unforced errors in the space of 30 seconds.
Despite that though, we were pleased with our performance in the end and had a healthy discussion in the bar afterwards about how to find new players for 11-a-side next season...amongst other things.
This included Jacko telling us he had seen Robin Pryke (ex-Rovers Player Of The Year) recently and he may be interested in playing again, while he also gave Lexton Harrison a phone while we were in the bar to see if he would like to make a comeback as well. Unfortunately though, Lex was on another planet at the time and said he would phone Jacko back in a week's time when he comes back down to earth ! 
