Monday, September 06, 2004

It only struck me yesterday afternoon what an absolutely top class header that was from Paul Curtis to equalise - if Wayne Rooney scored that one it'd be on the opening credits to Match Of The Day for an entire season, what a corker, whoomph get in.

Obviously I remember that one and I remember Paul's second to put us in the lead, especially the trail of destruction left behind by Hurricane Lewis (one goalkeeper and two defenders down, one other defender on his feet but requiring treatment), but I can't really remember the build up to our third goal - I know Dave powered it home from the left hand side of the goal, but I can't remember how we got to that point in the first place.

The reason I can't remember is probably the number of similar attacks that we had right throughout the game - we were awesome, I'd love to see the Sky Stats on that in terms of posession, shots and shots on target, I think it'd tell a pretty convincing story, and to be fair to Post Office they weren't even that bad a side.

I think Hilly kept their tall striker very quiet - you can't beat a guy like that in the air but you can make sure that he doesn't do anything with his feet and Hilly had him measured up very early on, nipping in to stop him getting the ball in the first place or being right up behind him when he did get the ball so he took too long to control it and got swallowed up by our marauding midfield.

I thought Dave and Neil were superb, working together and individually - a number of times I commented that I would hate to be a defender with Neil around as he chased down their defence as they were trying to bring the ball out of their area and nicked it off em. I then had to laugh in the second half at the look on the poor defender's face who was 'marking' Dave Lewis. So many times the ball came to Dave's feet (which was great) and each time the defender gave a great big puff of air as he realised he was seconds away from being 2 yards behind him running back towards his own goal. God knows how many chances we created, too many to count.

Other than that, everyone was at or virtually at the top of their game, control was good, passing was good, when the three subs came on I didn't notice any downturn in the performance while they got up to speed with the game, all three got involved straight away and Jamie Taylor began feeding the forwards with some lovely passing, Newy began knocking their midfield around and stopping any moves they were putting together alongside Crabbeman and Colin soaked up everything (not that much by that stage) and calmly played the ball forward to people's feet, as you'd expect.

Storming performance, don't know other results yet but I should think PO will fare better this season than they have done previously so it's nice to take 3 points off them in such a convincing manner - the way everybody reacted to going a goal down was more than I could ask for, no moaning, people actually trying to claim responsibility for it ("my fault" "no, it was my fault") and everyone patiently knowing that we had goals in us - all in all it was a very intelligent and mature performance, made me proud.