26th November – Cunning Stunts – defeat 10-2

The return of the Gob

After a long lay of many months, and the associated holiday of Lungboy who confessed that he has been “sorting my shit out”, I decided that I should dust of my typewriter and actually ensure that an article was on the decidedly inactive Mollies blog.

Despite the lay off, the same old problems still affect the Mollies. All told last night was a decent defensive performance against (cue sense of déjà vu) a younger, fitter, quicker and more skilful team. And this is at the root of the continued bottom feeding of the Mollies. We are currently sat at the bottom (*alongside and unassigned team) of our division on zero points with only the upcoming two games against unassigned teams to gift us six points. It’s like Wednesday all over again.

To be fair we have played the top two teams in the last two weeks conceding 21 goals and scoring 9. The majority of the team felt that this was a good showing against two teams that on paper should have completely mugged us. The Gob would agree with this but the red marks dotting my body from being a human dart board show my wish that our marking and tackling would improve just a bit. We have had a tendency in the last couple of weeks to allow attackers to get behind us and move into the corners all unawares. This has led to a number of crosses attacking the top of the D which in previous were infrequent occurrences.

Not so much the week before, but definitely last night, we couldn’t hit a barn door in anger. We have improved our ability to hit the ball with the introduction of Rob and Nathan. Also with the return of Lungboy there was a sense of optimism that we actually our strongest side available with an ability to jeopardise the opposition goal. Strangely, with the glut of shooting ability available, we could only aim at the back board rather than the net. It was not as if the opposition keeper was brilliant (as he threw one of our two goals into his own net). Had we been only slightly more accurate the score line would likely have been much more flattering. It is positive that James has been scoring much more regularly of late but with greasy pitches for the last two weeks, long shots should have allowed a following attacker to hit a rebound or saved shot.

Also the issue of substitutions reared it ugly head once again. An apoplectic Steve chiding the rest of the team for only allowing him 4 minutes of pitch time in the first half. However, a slightly different and amused take would be that “Chopper” was defending with muscular approach employed by your average prop forward and would likely result in a sin binning. As it stands his second half performance had him crawling of the pitch on his hands and knees before coming off, but the Gob was able to see him grabbing shirts and irritating the opposition attackers with great regularity. No doubt this led to the opposition throwing the ball away on our free kick in the last minute when they were 10-2 up. Sportsmanlike indeed.

All told, we benefited from the return of Leo after a 4 week lay off. However, with only one game in December, who knows what the stamina of our band of oldish men will be like come the new year. When we no doubt play another, younger, fitter, quicker and more skilful team once again.