Subs

• Hay for Evans
• S.Martin for Barnes
• A.Martin for Hill

Absentees

• Glover
• Twist
• Abbey

Well this is the hardest one of these I’ve had to write so far. It’s often that I am stuck for words or that I struggle to find logic in what I have seen on a football pitch, but hey, I think I may be stumped on this one.

"Try and Stay positive" says Martin……..Well it’s been 9 hours since the game and I’m still at a loss as to how we not only managed to lose, but managed to lose to a score line such as that one.

People will read the papers and think we got hammered, but personally I thought we were pretty much in control of the game. Maybe I am just to biased toward our lads.

Ok, positives. We fielded what I believe to be a very strong 11 players and it was a real challenge picking 11 as all 17 were available. The warm up went fairly well and all of the boys seemed ready, and to understand the roles they were asked to play.

I thought we bossed the 1^st 20 minutes but we wasted several opportunities, including 5 or 6 corners that we didn’t even manage to get into the box. Our game plan of getting the ball wide to Carl and Phil seemed to work well as they both had plenty of the ball in the 1^st half.

The back four seemed to be in control I couldn’t really see any other result than an Olton win.

AND THEN…we defended a corner very badly which disappointed me as we have worked on that recently…1-0

The second half saw much the same. We were caught out defending too high up the pitch which was disappointing as we were well aware of their forwards pace……….2-0…3-0….4-0.

In the second half alone we created 5 glorious chances, and here lies the problem. Graham, Henry, Carl, Sonny and Steve all SHOULD have scored and yet none did. We have scored only 20 goals on 13 league games. It is time somebody held their hand up and said I’m going to get a goal today.

Our season aims have been well and truly changed, our sole goal now being survival in division 1.

So come on lads, it’s going to be a scrap and some of the games may not be very pretty but lets find the determination and the heart to keep Olton Ravens up.

Steve