BNU Thirds 1 - Petone 8

Rearguard in tatters following a designer spanking

Following on from last weeks encouraging result (match postponed) we went into the game against the top team full of enthusiasm. Despite fielding a weakened team due to missing a few players because of the long weekend, we competed well for the first 5 minutes before experiencing first hand why the Armani’s are top - their striker beating our defence on the turn before finding the top of the net with an unstoppable shot.

At this point the doubting Thomas’ amongst us might have been fearing a glut of goals to follow in the first half and how wrong they were!! Instead we re-grouped and starting moving the ball around, getting a bit of joy down the right hand side and generally making a decent contest of it. To be fair the post (one of our stand out performers on the day) came to our rescue a couple of times, and a goal mouth scramble was heroically (some may say ungainly) cleared off the line.

In addition to the post, Tony was doing his upmost to keep the scoring down, making a classy one-handed save batting a swerving ball over the bar drawing comparisons with Ray Clemence  - we won’t mention the incident later in the game that prompted comparisons with Bruce Grobbelaar!

Up the other end of the field, Keagan was close to getting his first of the season, their keeper managing to get enough on the shot to knock it out for a corner, and then finally their defence was broken for amazingly only the 4th time this season. Brent, again the man on hand to fire the ball into the net following a devastating run from our one-man dynamo Richie, notching his sixth of the season.

So the half ended at 1-1 and the signs were good for taking a battling point away from the game. Unfortunately my memory goes a bit fuzzy for the next 45 mins, although I’m told a harshly awarded penalty (standard), 2 own goals and some great finishing feature as the lowlights of the half!

So all in all, very little positives to take from being on the wrong end of a stuffing Giorgio Armani himself might well have enjoyed.

Nigel Moore