When he arrived we had a look around the ground and wondered why there was green netting behind one of the goals preventing anyone from viewing the game from there. It turned out that there are plans to turn the ground into a three-sided ground (with the non-viewing side becoming the far touchline nearest the cricket pitch) in order to meet the ground grading requirements for Step 5. Alan noted that there was a real slope on the pitch and that it was a bit chilly as the ground was exposed to the wind.
Alresford had most of the play in the first 20 minutes but it was a very stop-start game, as the referee liked the sound of his whistle! This affected the Alresford players, as they weren’t sure what challenges they could make and in the end, it took a badly timed sliding tackle for the referee to bring out a yellow card and set the boundaries. This was the first of 9 bookings in the game!
The first clear cut chance was created after 25 minutes when Finlay went through the Lymington offside trap and put a cross in. The Lymington keeper got a hand to it and pushed it out of danger before an Alresford player could get to it. Finlay was causing Lymington a lot of problems with his movement and another shot soon whistled over the bar.
Lymington were almost gifted a goal on 31 minutes. An Alresford defender headed the ball back towards the goal, expecting his keeper to be near the goal line, only to find the keeper was out of position. The keeper just managed to get back in time to stop the ball from crossing the line, much to his team mates relief! This seemed to wake the home team up and a minute later they took a deserved lead with a shot from the edge of the box curling into the bottom left corner.
Alresford were forced to make a substitution a few minutes later for a ‘retribution’ tackle on one of their players who had been dishing out the heavy tackles earlier in the half. This didn’t change the pattern of play and Lymington continued to be caught out on the counter attack. At one point 3 Alresford players beat the offside trap only for the player with the ball to get greedy after running from the halfway line and blasting a shot over the bar when his two team mates were both in better positions.
Lymington had their first shot on goal after 37 minutes but it went just wide. If Alresford could have built a goal above the regular goal they would have been 8.0 up by halftime – another shot was hoofed over the bar just before the referee bought the first half to an end. Alan and I wandered up the stairs to the bar to catch up on the scores from around the country.
Alresford continued to hit shots over the bar in the second half and after a criminal miss in the 55th minute; the supporters around us started to wonder whether they might regret not taking their chances. The players on both sides weren’t helping the referee in getting the game to flow – too often their protests were loud and aggressive and their complaints when a decision went against them led to more bookings.
In the 65th minute Alresford finally managed to keep the ball on the ground when shooting at goal following a corner. The ball beat the keeper’s dive but cannoned out from shins of the player guarding the far post and was eventually cleared for a throw. A minute later and it was 2.0 in controversial circumstances – the ball was played into the Lymington penalty area and a shot was smashed through a crowd and past the keeper. However there was a Lymington player down injured in the box and an Alresford player had handled it before the shot came in. The referee missed all of this and gave the goal once the protests from Lymington had been dealt with.
This wasn’t enough to settle the nerves of the Alresford supporters. With just five minutes left to play, their team conceded an unexpected goal. A high long goalkick came down the pitch, was headed to the left and then volleyed into the top corner from outside the penalty area to bring Lymington back into the game. Instead of celebrating, one Lymington player decided to gob off at the referee and received a yellow card for his efforts.
As Lymington pressed for an equaliser, the injury time clock racked up another couple of minutes as an Alresford player was taken out with a strong tackle that the referee deemed was not a sending off offence, much to our surprise. A fourth goal came on 90 minutes but this time it was to Alresford. A mix up between the keeper and a defender with a back pass allowed Finlay to run onto the ball, slip it past the keeper and then boot the ball into the top right corner of the open goal from the edge of box.
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