Amateur Football Combination Premier Division

---

Amateur Football Combination Premier Division

Old Meadonians 2 Old Suttonians 2

 

There is an element of mystifying smoke and mirrors about Old Meadonians’ reappearance at the top of the A.F.C. premiership table but you don’t have to be a clairvoyant to realise that their reign is unlikely to be more then ephemeral, with fellow pretenders Old Hamptonians and Old Minchendenians breathing down their necks, having the comfort of two and three games in hand respectively.

In fact if Meads continue in the same lackadaisical way as they did at Riverside Lands on Saturday when they allowed a very ordinary Old Suttonians to snatch a head start, to fend off their hosts’ attentions for an hour with the ease and languid nonchalance of a shire horse swishing vaguely annoying flies from its rump and finally donated a last gasp equaliser to the visitors, then they might as well start concentrating on cups right now. That all this was happening while Meads were ‘enjoying’, if such a euphemism can be used to describe their attitude, sixty percent of possession, mostly in mid-field, was worrying, as it was further forward that problems arose.

Meads’ start could not have been much worse when in the opening skirmish Sutts won a corner and one of their tall defenders was given a free header at the near post from which he duly popped the ball into the top corner. The hosts’ reaction was measured but, though they got a grip of midfield and began to build up steady pressure, this was often undone by impatiently overcooking things by feeding the visitors’ keeper with comfy catches from crosses from too deep, leaving strikers Ed Glover and Craig Jones chasing moonbeams with too much to do to make good contact.

To compound matters, while Meads weren’t doing much to inconvenience their guests or register in the score book, Gary Robinson in the home goal had been called upon to make two superb saves at full stretch by the interval. Fifteen minutes into the second half Robinson had already acrobatically tipped another top corner bound shot over the bar when Meads burst into the lead with a brace of opportunist goals by poacher Jones. But they still found the killer touch hard to come by as anyone unlucky enough to get the ball in enemy territory must have felt he had the plague such was the exodus of colleagues from his vicinity, putting cooperation at a premium. With ten minutes to go, disaster struck when the referee’s assistant caught Meads’ defence square and waved on a visiting striker loitering suspiciously, to put the ball past the long suffering Robinson and leaving the referee to have the last word that he ‘decided not to overrule the decision’!

Squad: Robinson, Costello, Pointer, McCombe, Mace, Gerrish, Thompson, Gowers, Allen, C. Jones, Glover, Mantel, Makoukou.

 

October 31, 2013