Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 4 – Competitive Matches

After a rather uninformative and not particularly useful preseason, we reached the beginning of the league and not long after that, the first round of the cup which is called the Tester Challenge Cup.

At this point, we are at roughly the half way point of the season. There are only 16 leagues games per season as there’s only 9 teams in each league in these divisions.

So there’s a list of all the results up to this point and now I’ll go into more detail about some of the best matches and then end on a few general notes about the team’s performance over this period.

First match of the season vs. Hartfield II (Home):

This match is only really important as it was the first match of the season because as you can see, the scoreline was nothing special. However, we were actually the dominant team in terms of possession and chances created but our finishing was very poor (obviously as we didn’t score).

Tester Challenge Cup 1st Round vs. Ringmer III (Away):

I decided to try and counter attacking style for this match as we were away so we had less possession but actually created plenty of chances. We were dominant like in the last game but an excellent hat-trick from Elliot Hogan within 37 minutes put us 3-0 ahead which was enough for us to see out the match.

Season Match 2 vs. Stones II (Away):

We had a very poor first half and went into half-time 2-0 (no thanks to Greg Hackett giving away a penalty). For the second half, I gave the players the hair dryer treatment at half time and switched to control. This seemingly did the trick as Elliot Hogan scored more important goals with a brace, which added to goals from ball winning midfielder Chris Logan and left winger James Hamsher gave us the win.

General notes on team performance:

• Crossing game has been very effective, mainly with Greg Hackett as provider and Elliot Hogan on the end of the crosses putting them in the back of the net. Although our supporting target man Olu Akinsanya  also has a number of assists and I’m not sure whether this is also from crossing or if he has been flicking on long balls or heading down crosses to his teammates. I’ll see if I can find that out as it may be a very useful aspect of the tactic.
• As well as the over team personality apparently being ambitious (good as we’ve got a long way to go up the leagues), a lot of players also have a decent determination attribute which has shown in some great comebacks from being behind. And as I firmly believe in the importance of squad personality, this is very encouraging.

Join me next time when we find out if we’re going to get any youth intake, fingers crossed…