St Mary’s Reserves welcomed last week’s hosts City of London to Hall Place for the return league fixture looking to bag another 3 points and keep themselves at the summit of League 5 South. Missing from the side that earned victory in the “Battle of Catford” the previous weekend were the influential midfield duo Rich and Dilan. Replacing them were the other Deeljur brother Jav and a call up was handed to Tom Archer who returned to the left wing where he produced a couple of impressive performances earlier in the season.

The game began brightly with both teams stringing passes together in a stark contrast to last week’s encounter. Tom Archer was looking particularly dangerous in the opening exchanges on the left wing, linking well with the strikers and hurling a succession of long throws dangerously into the City of London box which their defence did well to cope with. The break-through for St Mary’s eventually came from the right however, as the ball was played into Jones who played a neat one-two with Warwick and calmly finished past the outrushing keeper.

The opening 35 minutes were fairly tight with both sides having a number of half chances before St Mary’s got their second through Jones again who, after closing down the keeper hung around in an offside position and was grateful when the under pressure opposition centre midfield player tried passing back to his keeper after good closing down from Archer and Warwick. Jones collected the backpass before taking his time rounding the keeper and eventually passing into the unguarded net. The game seemed over as a contest when shortly before half time the visitors were reduced to 10 men after a crunching Haughton tackle left one of their players unable to continue.

Going in 2-0 up at half-time the message was not to take the foot off the gas and, with the hill and wind now in our favour, grab a few more goals. Anything other than a home win never looked in doubt as the second half played out with St Mary’s attacking fluently and in numbers while the superb defensive unit of Matt, Joey, Ben and Ed snuffed out any attacking threat that City of London posed, with Chris in goal left as a spectator for pretty much the whole period. With the midfield confident that the defense could deal easily with anything getting past them the likes of Jav and Jon in the centre were roaming forward in attacking areas and using the width supplied by Spider and Archer to great effect.

With Mary’s camped in the opposition half it was only a matter of time before the third goal arrived. After a succession of five or six corners that either went straight out of play or failed to clear the first man, (by this time Jones had taken to shooting direct from the corners he took) Spider stepped up to take one and delivered a pinpoint ball to the back stick where Warwick arrived to power his header home from all of 4 yards out with around 25 minutes to go. Nunes then came on for the excellent Jav with Warwick dropping back to the midfield to accommodate him and the new frontman immediately showed some excellent touches to set up wave after wave of Tangerine attacks. Tom Archer was terrorising the defence down the left and linking up superbly with Jones and the pair created plenty of shooting opportunities which weren’t taken.

The final goal eventually came from another piece of good work down the left that released Nunes whose cross from a wide position looped over the keeper and seemed to be heading in at the back post. The keeper recovered well to punch it out but only succeeded in hitting it into the following up Spider who knew little about it but was credited with bundling the goal into the net to complete the 4-0 victory.

The victory, and more importantly the great performance should stand the Seconds in good stead for their end of season run which sees 5 out of their 6 remaining matches be against other sides in the top half of the league starting with a trip to Woking this Saturday to attempt to gain revenge for a 2-1 defeat in late November.


Story from Old St Marys Football Club: http://www.osmfc.co.uk/newsitem.php?id=217

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