Woodbridge Town 11 Whitton Sports Centre 0

Sunday 30th September 2007

Half-time 7-0 Goal scorers: Portaluri (4); Dimuccio (2); Aveston (2); Stephenson (2); Christie  The boys maintained their 100% record for the season with a comfortable 11-0 victory over bottom of the table Whitton Sports Centre. However this was in many ways the team’s worst performance of the year and the fluency of passing seen in some of the earlier games was lost as the game was played for most of the time in a very crowded Whitton half with the boys often forgetting to move the ball wide to stretch the opposition defence. Laurence Portaluri added another four goals to his tally for the season with some clinical finishing. He was also at the heart of most of the best moves of the first half and he was probably the one player, who realised that by playing our normal game the goals would flow. Two other boys, Jonathan Aveston and Giorgio Dimuccio got on the score sheet for the first time and both scored two goals as did Robbie Stephenson, whose first goal was a wonderful solo goal, which saw him dribble through the the Whitton defence before cooling placing the ball into the net. It was also good to see Jack Christie end his barren run with a goal midway through the second half. Ashley Paternoster was also denied on a couple of occasions in the second half by some good goalkeeping and the woodwork was struck twice in the first half. Defensively the team was rarely troubled and it was encouraging to get our first clean sheet of the season. Joe Elsom, in goal, had little to do, but he was alert to long range shots and made a good block late on in the game. He was also responsible for launching a number of attacks with some effective kicking from hands. The back four dominated in the air with Khaled Abdel-Aziz, Ben Hopkins and Ewan Wickson making some important headers. Ashley Archer put in his usual reliable performance and Jack Baldwin, who made his first league appearance today, playing forty minutes in the process, made some telling interceptions and looked to pass the ball out of defence. He should be delighted with his league debut. The one criticism with the defence today concerned a first half display when the boys played too tight and put themselves under pressure when trying to move the ball forward once they had broken up Whitton’s occasional forays forward. Sam Tripp continued to deputise for Matty Read in the centre of midfield. He protected the defence well, but both he and Aaron Thurlow found little space to work with. Giorgio and Kieron Marshall provided the width to start with, and then Jonno and Robbie took over. The difficulty as the match went on was that on occasions the wide players in their enthusiasm to push forward forgot to get back to support the defence and give them more options in trying to start off a new attack. We also need to get the ball wide more often – this was when we looked most dangerous. Three points were important to maintain the momentum and the clean sheet was very encouraging for the defence, which is certainly looking more and more solid. However it is important to learn from this game and ensure that we don’t lose the shape of the team in our enthusiasm to score. We also at times needed to show a little more composure in front of goal, although as the game went on the Whitton keeper did make some very important blocks.  Next week is our final league game before a two week break. Some changes will again be made to the squad for this match and then the game against Woodland Colts at the end of October. Hopefully the boys feel that they are all important to the success of the squad and it was good to see both Harry Hayward and Emile Burgoyne supporting the team even though they hadn’t been selected for today’s game.