|
We didn't really get going in the first half and too often were hitting balls past the midfield giving Adam Kay and Chris Anderson little chance to get involved. Even so, we had chances with probably the best falling to Wes Fletcher. He hit his shot into the side netting but he'd been pulled back by the defender and might just have got his shot on target without that.
Anderson picked up an injury just before half time and when we returned after the interval he'd been replaced by Dean Stott who usually plays at right back. We started to play a lot better and started to put Rochdale under some real pressure.
We put shots wide, occasionally failed to get shots in and on the visiting keeper made some excellent saves. Probably his best two were from Fletcher and Alex McDonald. He saved a Fletcher shot which dropped for Rob Turner whose goal bound shot was blocked by a defender, and then produced the save of the game to tip a McDonald shot wide of his right hand post.
It was surely only a matter of time before we took the lead and we should have done when Fletcher was brought down in the box right in front of the assistant. Sadly the man with the flag wasn't looking and the referee, after looking at his assistant for help, waved play on.
"We're going to lose this one 1-0," someone said as we moved into the last ten minutes, but that hardly seemed likely with Rochdale hardly troubling us. But, with the clock showing 87 minutes they broke the deadlock with a shot from the right hand side that nestled in the corner of the net. There was no way back from that and when the final whistle went we'd fallen to our second defeat of the season.
Only this week manager Steve Cotterill has said results don't matter, it is performances that count for the youth team. Given that, there were a lot of promising signs particularly during the second half. Results do matter though, they give the lads confidence and on top of that, I don't like watching us lose.
The team was;
on Sergeant, Ben Hoskin, Nik Kudiersky, Chris Lynch, Thomas Bradley, Alex McDonald, Chris Anderson (Dean Stott), Adam Kay, Alex-Ray Harvey (Matt Lomas), Rob Turner, Wes Fletcher.