THE CHAIRMAN

Good afternoon everybody and welcome to Addison Road for our fixture against Desborough Town FC. We have struggled against Desborough over the last two years and we certainly know we are in for a tough fixture today with the teams evenly matched in the league table. We are certainly on a roll of home matches and we have watched some great play in recent weeks. Desborough recently picked up a 1-0 away win at Rugby Town which shows how competitive they can be.

With regards to our performances, I was really pleased for the management group and the lads on Tuesday after the league highfliers rolled into town. The top sides always seem to turn up expecting to win and so it is nice see our boys hold their own like they did on Tuesday. In fact, I think we were a little unlucky to not snatch the victory with the chances we had in the second half.

With just two games left of our mini run of home fixtures, I feel we need to try to get something from the game today before a run of difficult away games. It is great to see that we have held our own in this league with largely a group of local players and we don’t want to get drawn into the lower positions in the league. A mid-table finish is something that would reflect all the hard work we have put in on and off the field in our second season in the United Counties Premier.

I am hopeful that we might get a few more of our transient supporters here today to cheer the boys on. With Banbury away at Chester it would be great to get a few more spectators in to support the team. With this in mind, we have opted to move our mid-week fixtures to Wednesday evenings for the following season and we hope this will help to boost numbers. It will be an interesting experiment for next season.. but for now, we hope you have an enjoyable day with us today and come back for more next Tuesday!

Best wishes

Richard Meadows Chairman

Good afternoon & welcome back to Addison road for our 3rd consecutive home game.

It’s been a very tough but good month for the first team and we are starting to get our rewards for good performances, I go back to Eynesbury away where we completely dominated, missed a penalty, Doyle got injured and they scored 2 goals on the break. Then Banbury away in the senior cup where we were outstanding on the night, most of the talk was about them refusing to play extra time as opposed to how good we were on the night. To be fair to Whingy he did text me the following day congratulating our performance. We then faced top of the league Rugby Town where again I thought we matched them for long parts of the game, in the end it was down to a couple of errors where you get punished against top sides. Last Saturday against Oadby we made a couple of tweaks and we were fully deserving of our 3 points against a very physical side.

To wrap the month up we faced in form Newport Pagnell Tues night under the lights. I felt we started the better of the 2 teams in a really tight affair and were creating good chances. With very experienced players on the pitch and loud dugout they were very vocal on every foul including Coombeys foul by the dugout on the half hour mark. I thought the officials handled them brilliantly. The yellow card for me was very harsh! I’m not one for getting involved with other dugouts however I felt that too much attention was on Coombes to get sent off, we tried to get the focus on us as opposed to my players. Once the game restarted they were the better side and we were glad for the half time whistle to reset. Second half we were excellent, probably the best we have played all season, we got the ball in good areas and were causing problems. We got our equaliser through Sherpy who was lively when he came on and probably should have scored a couple, the impact he made is exactly what you want from your substitutes, he was excellent. Once we scored the game opened up and we defended and manged the game brilliantly, we were also still creating good chances. In the end we held on for what is a really good point against a top side in the league desperate for promotion.

On to today we face another very physical opposition in Desborough, they had a great result last week away at Rugby so we will need to show exactly the same levels of work rate & bravery in our play as we have in the last few games. The last couple of weeks have been good but we will not get above ourselves, the boys will keep working hard and giving it everything to ensure we pick up another 3 points.

Finally I thought the support on Tuesday night was excellent, the players react off this so please keep getting behind us!