East go down on league season opener

The boys looked great in their new kit on a pleasant afternoon at Rowley Lane. Brady Maccabi twice beat the East by the odd goal or two last season and went on to win the Division with some ease. So we were expecting a tough game but that is not how the day panned out.

The boys were reminded to play the way they are coached in order to take advantage of large pitches like this. Snippets of the future were visible in patches with some great passing moves!

The first 20 minutes saw both teams sizing each other up but East looked a far more capable team. The defence had another experimental look to it with Joe Burgess playing with Bobby in the middle. A good partnership was formed and rarely did the team look troubled by the opposition, the opportunities that Maccabi did have were mostly self-inflicted errors.

In central midfield Max and Will started the game well with some nice touches combined with aggressive tackling.

But just as East were starting to dominate Maccabi broke away to nick an undeserved lead.

The boys showed their growing maturity and refused to let this affect their game. Some more nice passing moves followed and Owen and Cam in particular combined to create a number of dangerous raids down the right hand side.

Joseph K was having a great first half, and just before the break Max was put through to grab a deserved equaliser.

The 2nd half again saw a reasonably tight defence and by now Sam McKenna was having a great impact in midfield surging forward and trying to find the forwards at every opportunity.

But the game became very scrappy as both teams played down a narrow channel through the middle of the pitch. This reduced the ability to put any notable passing moves together and the Harvesters dominance slowly reduced.

As the game wore on a mistake gave Maccabi the lead but with less than 10 minutes to go Harvesters again hit back as Cam's cross was turned into his own net by a Maccabi defender.

With honours even, both teams should have been happy with result.........but disaster struck just before the end. A short back pass ended with the clearance hitting the forward and bouncing back towards goal. Despite his best efforts Oscar struggled to gather the rebound and the forward poked the ball in.

The result was very harsh but the boys learned some important lessons. Make the pitch big, spread the game out, show more composure and less dribbling in areas of danger.