A real ‘up and down’ game with plenty of ‘twists and turns’ at the Home of Chessington and Hook FC last night – (OK, no more puns!!!) was finally settled by Nick ‘Tricky’ Wilson in the 82 minute with a downward header that beat the Chessington keeper and struck the back of the net.  This victory made sure of second place in the league and therefore that very important home tie in the first leg of the upcoming play offs – why more or less? Wick FC can match our points total but there would have to be quite a large goal swing in their favour for them to pip us for second place.

These matches against our closest rivals are always going to be a bit feisty and this turned out to be no different. We took the field with four changes to the line up from the previous win last Saturday over Selsey, with a forward glance to another fixture away at Billingshurst in just over 40 hours’ time.

We started the game brightly and in the 3rd minute were ahead after Thompson Adjemi chased a ball to the right  hand bye line and got his boot to make a low and hard cross which evaded all the defenders and our attackers apart from Lewis Pearch who was on hand to slot the ball home from 8 yards (1-0).  We continued in the first half to have the better chances and could and should have increased our lead with at least two very good chances but either the final shot did not get away to its intended target or the opposition defenders were able to clear the ball.  HT 1-0.

We knew that we would be in for a real battle in the second half and after a chance was spurned by the opposition No11, it was very soon afterwards that they equalised with a low shot from approximately ten yards out.  This was a setback. However, we continued to be the more dangerous of the two sides and inevitably the game did in fact get a bit ‘feisty’ with one particular incident when an opposition player kicked out of the ball to one of our players; it was a clear red card offence but the referee who had an indifferent evening decided to book both players involved in the incident.  There were even more challenges that were questionable from our opposition, which makes the spectator think that these types of incidents could have been thwarted if only the officials had been stricter with previous infringements.

Be that as it may, after several substitutions, it was in the 82 minutes that Jann Stanley put over an excellent cross which ‘Tricky’ Wilson met with his head, and we had the lead again.  We had around 15 minutes left which included injury time to see the match out. We did this very well even though again there were some very robust challenges by our opposition in that time which went unpunished. We saw the game out and won 2-1.

It was a great result and testimony to the ‘boys’ tenacity and teamwork to get the right result. As mentioned above we quickly move onto our next game away at Billingshurst this Saturday and then very probably a home tie against Selsey (unless results for Arundel go their way hugely) on Saturday 29th April at Fetcham Grove.