Post by a more piratey game on Jan 31, 2015 19:41:16 GMT
I always thought that Thurrock was the Home of Darts, but it turns out that the home of the Darts, which might be different, is on the opposite side of the Thames. That was probably good news today, as it was snowing a bit in on the northern side, while where we were the rain was arrowing in before kick-off, but nothing worse than that.
Once we’d found out that the ground wasn’t the David Lloyd centre, and had to double-back on ourselves to park, it turned out that it was smallish but very modern, friendly and, above all, covered.
The pitch was a shocker though – like the ones I used to play parks football on in Januarys of yore. Mr Jermaine Easter, I thought, won’t have played on one of those for many a year.
Having missed the early-bird sarnie special, I paid £3.20 for a bacon roll at about 2.15. I suppose they have to pay for this new stadium somehow. There were quite a lot of Gas there, maybe around 1,000, as well as more police than I’ve noticed this season, although the mood was generally pretty relaxed and the pub was friendly to Gasheads. There were fewer of them than of us, but they had a flag and generally they made a bit of an effort.
Mildy was back in the team, even though Puddy hasn’t really done much wrong, and with Beardy out we had Ledbitter, Parkes, McChrystal and Browner across the back, our new high-powered strike force of Blissett, Easter and Taylor, with Lockyer, Mansell and Monkey moving about in the middle.
We wondered whether we’d continue to struggle without the Beard, who always seems to provide the heartbeat to the team, especially when he plays centrally.
They had a giraffe-type bloke at centre half, as well as a couple of muscly ones, but the one that stood out was the sausage roll of a goalkeeper, with a Kevin Austin-sized behind but without Stone Cold’s height to make it less noticeable. It looked like he might have been tucking into too much confectionery or something.
For the first five minutes or so they looked better than I had expected, but then we started to get into the game and were pushing it around with good confidence and style. It was a pitch that meant that any tippy-tappy stuff would get stuck, so Rovers had to do some running and push strongly-hit passes into space, which they were doing with some aplomb.
Easter was hobbling though, and he soon came off to be replaced by somebody who looked like Balanta but an awful lot slimmer. I took it that the training must have paid off, but he still didn’t run around very much or any faster than before, though he did look much more the part.
The rain had stopped and, against a park-the-bus style defence, Rovers looked capable of doing almost anything except scoring. Balanta had a good move in the box, but fluffed it when the ball got slowed down by the mud, which wasn’t really his fault.
They weren’t above a bit of pulling and shoving, and they had 3 yellows with only about half an hour of the match gone. It looked generally unnecessary to me – maybe the act of chippy part-timers who were looking to try to rattle the biggish city team with the relatively large following.
They fluffed an easy pass, which Lockyer pounced on to provide a defence-slicing pass to Taylor, while most of the Darts were still facing in the wrong direction. Taylor shot on target and past the fat one, only for it to be slowed tantalisingly by the mud while we held our breath to see if it was going to make it to the goal. Like Sammy Igoe’s at Wembley, it did, and we were all cheerful for a couple of minutes.
They got a corner and my mate Statto Dave had just told me that according to his reading of their results this season they are ‘deadly from corners’, when they headed it to Mildy who fluffed it into his own goal. Puddy may be shorter, but I doubt he would have done that.
So half-time came and we went to get a soup to warm up. Rovers had played well, but they’d scored with their first proper effort on goal, and we hadn’t had many more than them. At least we’d put enough work in to get muddy, and the team came out in clean shirts for the re-start.
The second half started as the first half had finished, with them back in the game a bit more, and DC decided to bring off Bliss for Ellis. Bringing on Ellis made sense to me, and Bliss had had a fairly subdued game, but the conditions didn’t allow for finesse and Bliss was at least a big lump to aim for, and one with a decent scoring record for us, in the increasingly windy conditions.
Their fans found their drum, that dull staple of many grounds without crowd or atmosphere, and we started to find it all slowly less enjoyable. One of our centre backs fell over in the mud, putting their bloke through, but he bottled it a bit and shot early when it looked like he had time to take it much closer.
We had a few chances too, but none that came really close and we laboured partly in the hope that the part-timers would tire in the last quarter of the game. The pitch was getting even worse, with the centre circle turning into something out of Richard Hammond’s Total Wipeout, but we seemed to want to take the ball across the middle very often.
Dawson came on for Ledbitter, who had faded a bit after a promising start with some good and some not-nearly-so-good first and touches. I was in two minds about the substitution – it seemed a waste to sign him and not play him, but on the other hand I could hardly imagine a less dribbler-friendly pitch. In the end he didn’t seem to do much better or worse than anyone else.
Out of nowhere, one of our many breaks suddenly went close, with Ellis quickest to poach a goal from the rebound. We weren’t sure it had gone in, but then the Rovers players started celebrating so we all started to join in. Not a classy goal, but a good quick reaction from Ellis and just what we needed.
They got a free-kick a couple of minutes later, though, and their guy spanked it over the wall and past Mildy. Unlike the first one, it didn’t look like bad keeping but a tip-top strike – just what Mansell had needed when he had his at the other end.
We had one last hurrah when Mildy made a superb throw out to the right wing, from which it was taken towards their box, only for the cross to miss Ellis. A shame, but to some extent the story of both our day and our attacking season in games where we’ve missed Sincs. We have a decent all-round game, but at this level can still lack the edge to check-out.
