Amateur Football Alliance Middlesex & Essex Senior Cup

Old Salvatorians 2 Old Meadonians 1

The tumultuous sound of clucking, as chickens came home to roost, could well have doubled for the sound track of a well known animated film, as Old Meadonians’ fell victim in the A.F.A. Middlesex & Essex Senior Cup to struggling Old Salvatorians who are without a league point so far this season, at the lush Met Police ground at Bushey, Herts on Saturday, especially as, while their so-called betters were being unceremoniously ushered out of the senior cup, Meads’ second team were having no difficulty in summarily demolishing Salvos’ second team in the intermediate cup by the healthy margin of 5 goals to 1 on Riverside Lands.

Meads’ problem is not necessarily terminal but neither of their coaches, Paul Rumley and Rory Vermeulen, were particularly enamoured of the fact that players appeared to take no heed of the ‘gypsies warning’ which was not to go behind early for the umpteenth time this season.

The visitors had already squandered three acceptable chances when on twenty minutes the perennial ball over the top gave the hosts’ lone striker the freedom of the borough to run twenty yards unescorted and lob the isolated Gary Robinson as he closed down the angle. If you complicate this by adding opponents who hid their goal behind a nine man defence and whose penalty area was as impenetrable as a submarine net round a German capital ship in a Norwegian fjord it was possibly small wonder that, when shots weren’t blocked, in their efforts to avoid tank traps Meads found the woodwork was the closest they got to registering in the score-book.

The second half was a repeat of the first with the visitors more than doubling the amount of scorned chances, except that on ninety minutes Meads were thrown a late life-line when the home keeper parried a shot for the quick reacting Ryan Bright to tie things up. Now it was time for Meads to become headless as instead of playing for extra time, when it would have been doubtful that the hosts who had been fought to a stand-still could have held out for another thirty minutes, on ninety three minutes they decided to put on a charge, lost the ball with their defence in disarray giving the hosts the luxury of three players breaking to turn the sword in the wound with the winner.

Squad: Robinson, Mace, Pointer, McCombe, Gowers, Costello, O’Sullivan, Chapman, Shea, Bright, C. Jones, Allen, Sawyer, Mantel.

December 4, 2013