Downed

Saturday 8th September

CML North

Easington United 2 Ollerton Town 3
 

What always looked a tough month when the fixtures were released continued with the visit of Ollerton to the Farm.

The Nottinghamshire side had enjoyed something of a revival under new manager Dave Winter towards the back end of last season and they’d carried this form into the current campaign.

They arrived on the Humber Riviera boasting four wins out of four, albeit this record may well have been punctured had their floodlights not packed up during the home game against AFC Mansfield with the visitors leading 2-0 at the time.

Plenty had been said and written about this incident in its immediate aftermath and some of the accusations levelled by members of the Mansfield club clearly still rankled judging by my pre-match conversations with several of the visiting committee.

 

This was our first game “post-Newton” and The Sumo’s problems were further exacerbated by the continuing absence of Jimmy D and Frosty’s arrival clearly the worse for an extended session the night before.

At this level you always get shown up for such lapses and in addition to some woeful attempts to control the ball first half, Frosty’s comeuppance came midway through the first half.

Having worked hard to cancel out Munson's opener for Ollerton, thanks to Neilo’s header from another delicious Tom Mc set-piece, we looked certain to take the lead when Neilo showed a rare turn of pace to leave the defence trailing in his wake down the left.  Looking up he picked out the arriving Frosty perfectly only for the ball’s recipient to…well, the next blog post “tells” what happened next more accurately than I can!

 

I’ve posted before how hard a side we are to break down when we’ve got our noses in front and who knows how this game may have panned out had we held a 2-1 lead into the interval and beyond.

Instead, it was the visitors who took control with two goals in a five-minute spell midway through the second half.  The first owed plenty to some wonderful skill from Easom; the second to some careless defending on our part.

Had it not been for Charlie we may well have been buried on the back of these two goals.  As it was we rallied and got ourselves back in it when another McLaughlin delivery picked out Eli for 2-3.  Game on…

In the dying moments we were to suffer two major setbacks.  First was the raising of the assistant’s flag that denied Eli the equaliser from another set-piece.  But it was the second that would have the more long-term repercussions – Sam Mc taking an awkward tumble while helping avert a fourth Ollerton goal on the counter and sustaining a broken wrist in the process.  The manager had lost his “talisman”…for up to eight weeks.  Ouch!

An official report of the game, along with a full set of Burt Graham's photographs, can be found here.
Ollerton's own report can be found here.