Away vs Slade Green Knights 8Oct23

Match report by Ciaran Larkin.

This was our 4th game of the season and we faced a side who we know from last season, they were decent when we played them so we knew we were in for another tough afternoon.
With a number of players unavailable, we started the game with the bare 11 players, but were down to 10 within minutes as Liam’s hamstring resulted in his very early exit from the match. The game was scrappy with the Lions changing their shape to a 4-4-1 with Arthur living off a few long balls but with little good play from either side. As the game wore on in the heat and with no ability to change the system or players, Slade Green found an opening from a long ball, a little confusion in the Lions defence and a close shot from inside the area made it 0-1 to our opponents, which was the score as the 1st half ended.
Ciaran was able to join the match for the second half, so we were back to 11 v 11 and meant we could play a little bit more fluidly and like we have been for the past couple of weeks. We were 1-0 down but we started to get a couple of more chances, but lacked in our final pass or shot on goal. And this proved costly as they went down our end and got their 2nd of the afternoon to double their lead. Then one of their players got sent off about 10 minutes later for a bad tackle, which could’ve given us a glimmer of hope that we could get a result, but it wasn’t to be as they held on for a 2-0 win over us and ended our 100% record this season. We knew that that wasn’t our greatest performance and that we definitely had room to improve, and with no game this week we can work on what we didn’t do well in terms of our attacking creativity.

Well done to Ted for his MoM performance and a match ball was presented to Ciaran for his 4-goal haul the previous week.