Match of the Day: The Next Instalment

Thursday night last week saw the latest fixture for our work football team. This time out we played our now annual fixture against the guys from upstairs in the business support team under the floodlights at the local non-league clubs stadium.

We won the corresponding fixture last season by 3 goals to 2 although we went into this game with a general acceptance that we've taken half a step backwards in the past year - two or three of our better players have moved on and, to compound the problem, a couple of them have moved over and joined our business support colleagues.

To compensate for this we went into the match with a somewhat conservative game-plan: playing with a flat back four with a three-man defensive midfield just in front of them, two wide attacking midfielders and just the one forward.

Things went pretty well to plan I think it's fair to say. Having fallen behind to an early goal - a penalty - we equalised shortly before half time when the opposition keeper misjudged a shot/cross from out wide. One one at half time.

We switched things around a bit at half time reverting to a 4-4-2 formation and I think this actually suited us a bit better. We exchanged goals - 2:2 including a superb goal from our strker from the narrowest of angles.

With around 15 minutes remaining we took the lead - another goal from Matt our striker, the youngest and probably best player on our team - before conceeding the last goal of the game following a speculative shot from distance that beat our keeper who was still feeling the effects of an earlier sliding challenge.

So, 3:3 the final score and all in all a good performance and a good evening. Again I played the full 90 minutes and felt I did ok - playing on grass was certainly physically more demanding than our usual surface of astroturf.

We can still improve of course - clearly not everyone in the side believes in playing for the team! - and we'll take a lot of confidence from this perfromance and result into our next fixture in around a month.

Thanks are due to those people that came out on a cold and wet evening to offer support (and half-time oranges!), to the three match officials for giving up their evening, of course, to the volunteer staff from the football club for their hospitality.