Kickoff: 5:00 pm Sunday, September 19th at Sutherland Turf
Entering our first away match of the season one could not help but recall our last trip to Sutherland Turf on Sunday, September 13th 2009 (Norvan Saints 3 vs W Rino’s 1).
While we again left North Vancouver with nothing to show for our efforts, we can at least take away the fact that our overall performance was much better. In fact if not for the comical (even school-boy) fashion with which we conceded our two goals, we certainly would have taken a share of the points from this match.
With only nineteen players on hand we started with a strong, attacking line-up. Our ability to close down the opposition led to a number of early mistakes from the Saints. After creating some good opportunities
we were rewarded for our bright start with a somewhat fortuitous goal by Ben: his looping strike from the right-wing finding its way over the hapless Saints keeper.
What happened shortly there after was a sign of things to come.
On a day where I had earlier witnessed Anton Ferdinand – who surely had Cesc Fabregas in his own fantasy pool – conspire to gift Arsenal an early led at the Stadium of Light and Richard Stearman gift the hopeless Alan Hutton his first goal since early 2007 at White Hart Lane, I might have expected the extra-ordinary.
However, nothing could prepare us for the amazing own goal which followed Ben’s opener and brought the teams level at half time (enough said about that)!
After the re-start Rino’s again struggled to get up to speed as a number of the mass substitutes looked to find their touches. With the rain continuing to fall, play was bogged down in the middle of the pitch and both sides were guilty of stray passing on the slick turf.
Towards the middle of the second half, Rino’s again came to life but failed to test the Saints keeper who had proven himself shaky in the first half (other than Max’s usual hustle in which he somehow managed to injure himself rather than the keeper this time).
As the match neared an end there really was only one question left to be answered: what do set-pieces, long throw-ins and corner kicks have in common for RVSC ‘B’? The answer was unfortunately that we struggled to defend them and so handed Saints all three points following a scramble in our penalty area.
It was a disappointing way to end an otherwise even contest, yet the performance can at least be seen as a step in the right direction for a team with expectations as lofty as ours.
Team: 4-4-2 and still too many to remember…
Final Score: Norvan 2 – Rino’s 1