Tarleton Corinthians 2  Euxton Villa 1

A challenge when coaching boys football is to get them to realise that just because you have beaten a team before in the season, it does not mean that you will beat them again. Unfortunately too many Euxton players seemed to have fallen into that trap before this game. In the earlier fixture in the season Euxton won 6 - 2 and whilst Tarleton have improved since then, this match could have finished with the same result.

Euxton started brightly enough and pressed Tarleton back into their own half for the first 10 minutes. In that time we could have had 4 goals with Dominic , Lewis and Connor all with great opportunities that we didn't take.

Tarleton worked hard to get into the game and came into it more in the middle of the half and Euxton concended a poor goal after 17 minutes. Firstly having beaten our man on the right, with an opportunity to get a ball into the danger area we tried to take an extra man on and lost possesion. Tarleton broke and George made a challenge on the centre forward and cleared it towards the touchline. The Euxton right side and defence switched off and allowed a determined run by the Tarleton wing to be rewarded by keeping the ball in play and putting a cross in where a delighted forward finished. I give credit for the Tarleton player's effort to keep the ball alive - showing a commitment normally seen by Euxton players but too often missing in this game. All the same it was a sloppy way to go behind.

The rest of the half was competitive but Euxton had further chances to equalise with a point blank save from a brave Tarleton goalkeeper keeping them ahead.

In the second half Euxton started well again though going in ahead had clearly lifted the Tarleton players and they were working incredibly hard. Despite that we still had chances to score Josh and Lewis uncharacteristically missing the target when through on the keeper.  Connor was working particularly hard up front through determination to challenge and ride tackles. It was fitting that he should finish inside the box for 1 -1 . With 21 minutes to play we expected the Euxton surge to come in the latter part of the game but it never happened.

We gave away another soft goal when the centre forward from what looked like an offside position, but evidently wasn't, got behing our defence. A good covering challenge forced him to shoot . 99 times out of 100  it would have been a routine save from Matty but a bobble allowed it to agonisingly cross the line.

We still had time to get back into it but despite a lot of huff and puff never looked like doing so. We brought Joe onto the right wing with a clear instruction to stay wide and stretch the defence. Despite sticking to that instruction for the last 10 minutes we never got the ball to him despite the acres of room that he was in.

Tarleton are a hard working and stubborn side - on the day they deserved what they got becasue everyone of them worked hard to win it. Whilst we did not play our best football by a long way we still had more than enough chances to have made the second Tarleton goal irrelevant . We didn't take our chances when on top and could not seem to respond once we were challenged.

The loss of the unbeaten record was the price we paid for an overall sloppy performance. We had too many players with very little spark and sterling efforts from 3 or 4 players was not enough to carry the team.

Man of the Match : Connor - never stopped trying