Jamrock 6 – CRFC Hounds 0

This was the Hounds first friendly game of the new season against a very young, (too young) fit and athletic looking Jamrock side. In fact some were so young, they turned up with their Mums and had their homework with them! Turns out that the majority weren’t actually Jamrock players and that most of them played for Hillingdon Borough. This could be a long afternoon.

However, with 10 minutes to go before kick off, they only had 8 players and we were fancying our chances. Two more turned up and then to make it even, Garry “The Boss” Morgan donned a Jamrock shirt and spent a 5 minute cameo playing up front, until they had a full team. In doing so, he managed to double their average age and BMI index. They weren’t having that and he was soon taken off!

The game kicked off and Hounds took the game to Jamrock and had the best of the first twenty minutes. Our slightly makeshift defence of Dan, Stu and Pascal were holding the line well and winning everything in the air, whilst Paul Roche, Eric and Rob were winning the battle in midfield. Five minutes in and some great control from Eric saw the ball laid off wide and yours truly swung a cross in to Serge, who leapt like a Salmon but unluckily flicked a header just wide.

Matt Creasey was causing issues down their left side and it looked like we had them on the rack. Several more crosses came in but we just couldn’t convert. At the other end, Graham pulled off a wonder save from inside the box to keep the score at 0-0.

When Jamrock did attack we were generally keeping them at bay. They started to get frustrated and resorted to taking longs shots….unfortunately they were pretty good at them. A game that was pretty even at half time had seen us fall behind to 3 cracking long range goals that Graham had no chance with.
The second half saw a more battling display, Matt Taylor was creating problems in midfield whilst Nigel was doing a great job keeping their right winger at bay. Garry came extremely close to scoring when a great ball from Matt put him through in the area on the left side. Unfortunately, despite the earlier rain, the ground was still rock hard and the ball was always running away from him. Garry did well to get to the ball but his shot went narrowly wide.

Jamrock/Hillingdon score three more in the second half as you could see that fitness was starting to take its toll but overall I think the Hounds should be proud of their performance. This certainly won’t be the team that Jamrock put out in the League (if it is we’ll checking ID!) and we should take real encouragement from how we started and how we never gave up.

I couldn’t pick a man of the match but special mention should go to our back three of Dan, Stu and Pascal and then Eric in the second half, who were quite frankly superb.