Big game this one. Win and we go top of the table, lose and we can kiss goodbye to the league title. So, we did the latter. After lack of concentration and individual mistakes, we went in at half time 0-3 down. Confidence was low and something was going to have to change. Chris Clark made way for Rick Morris and we moved to a 4-3-3 in a bid to get some goals.

We started brightly and worked far harder than we had in the first half. Jay Breen – who had now moved up front – collected a bouncing ball in the penalty area, flicking the ball over the defender’s head with his right foot and onto his left to smash the ball home. It was as close to Paul Gascoigne vs. Scotland at Euro ’96 as you’re likely to see.

Shortly after, Jim Armstrong came on for Dylan May and we re-shuffled once more, with Raz moving to right-back, myself to left-back and Jim coming into midfield. Jim scored soon after coming on and at 2-3 we had them rattled. The usual arguing and complaining to the ref started up, but in fairness to HSBC they settled quite quickly and the score remained like this for some time.

HSBC were always a threat, the big lump up front was causing us problems all game. They scored a 4^th with about 15 minutes to go. Their right-winger was offside by some margin – whoever that ref was needs his eyes testing!  They could have had more too, Mark making a couple of decent saves and some shaky moments in our penalty area from corners too. Overall it was a fair result and we need to hope other results go our way for us to finish 2^nd and gain promotion – surely we deserve that given what we’ve achieved this season?

A double win at Polytechnic next week will hopefully do it.

MOM – Tony Barrett. Despite the goals we conceded, he dealt with their ‘good feet for a big man’ centre-forward very well, particularly in the 2^nd half.

Richard Clark