After three resounding wins to open the season the Men’s 4s welcomed one of the two Chelmsford teams in our division for the early game at Warners. We welcomed back Giles and Nick who had been missing after our first game but were without the spine of our team with Rich, Webby, Pete and Clarky all absent. If you want to check out what Rich is up to, visit the website of the Over 70s World Cup: https://masters.altiurst.com/competitions/336. He’s already racked up one clean sheet in a 5-0 win over Ireland.

Anyway, back to East League Division 5 South East, where the first half was evenly contested with Chelmsford having a fair share of the ball but not making any chances, while we broke sporadically and won a few short corners but couldn’t make any count.
Nil-nil at half-time and we tried to come up with a plan on how to take control of the midfield. Unfortunately, pushing a defender forward had the opposite effect, and opened us up at the back. Within 10 minutes of the restart we’d let in two goals and found ourselves behind for the first time in the season. A reversion to four at the back provided some stability and we made a few more chances both from open play and short corners. However, we found their keeper equal to all our shots which to be fair, mainly just tested that his pads didn’t have any holes in them. Continuing to push forward, we then fell to another sucker punch, failing to mark properly from a free-hit, and allowing another shot which Neil had no chance to save.

So our strong start to the season came to a shuddering halt. No one really played to their potential and we ended up well beaten and heads down. Man of the match votes went to Sampi and Nick, but the clear winner was Asa, who never stopped trying in whichever position he was asked to play. On to Havering.