Abbey United 3 Kettering Town 0 - Saturday 15 November 2008
This game was arranged as Kettering were playing away at Histon. It was their third ever game together, but as they had won their last two Abbey United's players were rightly fearful. They looked very professional as the they arrived, all shirts and bibs and proper warm-up routines, very unlike the rabble in yellow!!
With some of our younger and newer players keen to make it to Crawley, it was a more experienced Abbey United line-up that took the field, with a couple of debutants and players drafted in due to the U's playing somewhere else.
Manager Mark Case 'volunteered' to go in goal for the first period of the game. Lance made his debut at left back, and became the 30th different player to play for Abbey United this season. Joe Cooke, who played once last season, returned to play up front, and Andy Moore came into midfield to make his debut. Mark, Andy and Joe all played together for a less than successful Sunday league team a few years ago, meaning that there were some people in the team who knew each other.
Thoughts amongst the management team were leaning towards starting with a 3-5-2 system; thankfully some of the key players to this didn't show up and so we went with an orthodox 4-4-2 with the central midfielders instructed to sit close to the back four.
The starting line up was:
GK: Mark Case, RB: Andrew Lang, LB: Lance Sharman, CB: Mark Bentley, CB: Ben Yelton, CM: Andy Moore, CM: Frankie Fry, RM: Mike Osbourn, LM: James Barringer, FW: Harry Weller and FW: Joe Cooke.
Subs: LB: Richard French and RB: Richard White.
The match started brightly, with both teams playing some nice football. Abbey United did well to protect their goalkeeper, who had little to do early on in the game. The midfield pair of Frankie and Andy was working well, showing Mr Capello that it is possible to play midfielders who play the same game together!
Abbey United took the lead after 15 minutes. James found himself in an unnatural amount of space and put the ball towards the back post for Mike to steer home. By this point, we had already had more shots on goal than we did in the entire of the previous game away at Northampton (i.e. more than none). It was 2-0 not long after when Frankie gathered the ball in midfield before firing a shot into the top corner of the goal from - according to him - 47 yards.
In the pub later the management decided it was more like 25, but either way it was a goal that deserved to be seen by more than the 5 or 6 substitutes in attendance. After this, Kettering started to play a bit. They realised that maybe if they had some shots, they might score goals. Mark tipped a shot onto the post (not that anyone saw the touch that kept it out) and then a chance flew past the post.
Following a Kettering corner, Abbey United showed that they are as good at counter-attacking as Arsenal. The ball fell loose 25 yards from goal, Andy Lang tackled like never before and the ball broke to Mike who took it on and blasted it past the keeper. The previous management regime for Abbey United wondered what had happened. Their current regime wondered too.
Half time 3-0
The second half saw some changes, most notably, scorer of two goals Mike going in goal as he had 90 minutes to play that afternoon. Mark went to centre back with Ben going onto the bench.
Kettering really came at us in the second half, playing four up front and pushing us back. We struggled to get hold of the ball and had to spend large parts of the half 'under the cosh' as the cliché goes. Mike made a couple of good saves to prevent Kettering getting a foothold in the game, Joe and James had chances to wrap it up but the keeper made fantastic one-on-one save from Joe, and James missed with a volley. Kettering's keeper also made a save that any keeper would have been proud of, shifting the direction of his dive following a deflected shot.
Kettering continued to press for a goal, but couldn't get through the strong Abbey United defence. With ten minutes to go, James came off injured and Mark went upfront. There won't be many players that play centre back, centre forward and goalkeeper in a game. (Ed. 10 minutes upfront nearly killed me, and I am never, ever doing it again.)
Final score 3-0
A superb performance from a team who have been slowly getting to know each other over the last few weeks. If we played Mansfield or Northampton now, we may well get a result. If we played Millwall again, we would still get stuffed. A first win and clean sheet of the season was made more impressive as we didn't have a real goalkeeper. Mentions this week must go to everyone. Everyone played well, battled well, kept a good defensive line and tracked back. Here's to hoping we can continue this good form
Mark Case
For more information about Abbey United, visit their website www.abbeyunited.co.uk
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