It's Just Not Football

If last Saturday's game away at Barrow was depressingly awful, this afternoon's at home to Maidenhead was even more depressingly cynical.

Right from kick off it was clear that Maidenhead had just two tactics: one was to kick the ball as far as possible in the direction of their big striker and see what happened; the second was to disrupt the flow of the game by taking as long as possible with every free kick, goal kick and throw in and, worst of all, by pretending to be injured by every tackle or even when there wasn't another player anywhere near them.

Sadly, it worked. The referee did nothing to stop their time wasting tactics. They scored one goal from a deflected free kick which the assistant indicated was offside but the ref overruled him, were immediately awarded a soft penalty which our keeper saved and scored the winner from a breakaway which we should have stopped.

The blip shows our centre back Tom Bradbury (19) celebrating what he thought was an equaliser but the ref already has the whistle in his mouth to disallow it for offside.

We at least tried to play football but had no cutting edge in the first half; we were better inthe second half but only managed to take one of several chances. That was with 8 minutes to go, just after they scored their second, and they managed to see the game out by falling over and / or kicking the ball out of the ground at every opportunity leading to a very bad tempered finale.

No doubt they will describe their play acting and gamesmanship as being "professional" -it obviously work as as they're 5th in the table-but it is just ruining the"beautiful game". Even more depressing is the fact that their manager is Alan Devonshire who, in his West Ham playing days was a skilful, entertaining footballer. Rant over!

On a more cheerful note we enjoyed a very sociable park run this morning, with Tess breaking her previous PB by over 30 seconds.

All behind with comments, I'm afraid.