After watching an inspiring performance from the 3s, we got on the pitch ready to face Long Sutton. With all the shuffling within the club, we had 2 new faces, Charlie and Alec, joining our young squad and Maz.

We had a flying start with Will putting in a clever deflection within a minute, breaking his goal scoring record last season. Immediately we were already thinking about beating the very high standards set by our 3s earlier in the day. We continue dominating the game but failed to increase our advantage due to some heroics by the Long Sutton goal keeper and more importantly the goal being too small. Sadly, failure to inflict more damage to our opponents made them stronger, we then found ourselves back in level-terms when Long Sutton cross the ball into the D, probably for Peter Crouch considering the height of the ball, and tapped in near post.

We started our second half very strongly, again dominating in possession, but found ourselves 2-1 down when their forward cunningly invited himself in when George forgot to close his gate. We woke up after this and started attacking their D fiercely, scoring a wonderful equaliser. Dave made a daring run all the way from our defence to their D, passing the ball to Charlie, who found Ollie in the far post. Ollie understood very well the importance of the moment, decided to spend an extra minute making his touch and putting the ball into the goal.

We continued the fight and we are very close to scoring the winner, but this never happened due to John’s and my lack of hitting skills. As the day gets hotter and we got more tired, I started having visions that Long Sutton players, in green tops, were just trees, and decided to chop them with 3 minutes left. Perhaps that is why I got sent off.

Overall, it is a great game to start the season, our new players settled in really well and at times our team play looks really strong. I am sure when the goal gets bigger and we learn how to hit the ball, we will have our finest hour under our new leader, John, who successfully ousted our previous disloyal leader, Mr Matt Puddefoot, in the events of the summer 2023.