The last time the 2’s faces Ramgharia, they were fighting for promotion at the top of the league and we managed to hold them to a 3-3 draw at Shobnall. All the way through the season. This time round we expected a much more challenging game, especially as we’d been warned by a number of teams about the fairness of the umpiring at Ramgharia.

So where the umpires as bad as we expected… No
Did they miss some things / make the wrong calls…Yes, but so does every umpire
Were we on our best behaviour…No :-)
Should we be proud of our performance …Yes 100%

In the first half of the game we looked the stronger of the two teams; a handful of penalty corners lead to nothing for either team, but a lovely cross from Reece and a deflection from Seyi resulted in our first goal at 9 minutes; it took another minute for us to double our lead, with James Chell scoring his first goal for the 2’s.

A green card for Danny Bond gave Ramgharia a one man advantage, but digging in deep the 2’s managed to hand on to their 2 goal lead.
It was starting to feel like a game of penalty corners; on their fifth penalty corner of the game, both umpires failed to see a Ramgharia player control the ball with his chest before scoring their first goal of the game.

An overly enthusiastic goal celebration from Ramgharia resulted in Dave being ‘accidentally’ hit in the shoulder and Jamie on the baseline with a gash to the head; unfortunately, Dave’s protestations resulted in the second card of the game, a yellow, and with no subs to replace an injured Jamie we were down to 9 men.

Another brace of penalty corners didn’t affect the score line and the first half ended 2-1 to the 2’s.

With Jamie out of the game, the 2’s were forced to play-on with just 10 men and Ramgharia took full advantage and started the second half strongly, an apparent mistimed kick from X resulted in Ramgharia getting their equaliser at 41 minutes – see my apology below.

The penalty corner onslaught continued, with X making stunning save after stunning save, even Ramgharia were applauding on the half way line. On their tenth penalty corner of the game, Ramgharia managed to squeeze the ball under Nathan Dawson on the left post to take the lead at 46 minutes.

Another five penalty corners went Ramgharia’s way but they were unable to capitalise on any of them. An exchange of words between Rad and one of the umpires resulted in a red card at 62 minutes which was downgraded to yellow after the game.

Ramgharia were unable to capitalise on the 2-man advantage and the game ended 3-2 to Ramgharia.

Time for an apology from me – X had one of the best games I’ve seen him play, even Ramgharia took the time to write to the club to comment on his performance…but I thought he had mistimed a kick an cost us a goal; so instead of voting for him as man of the match, I voted for him as dick of the day.

After the voting was all done and dusted, Nathan Dawson fessed up to say X hadn’t mistimed a kick at all, but instead he’d managed deflected the ball around X and into our own net – scoring the twenty fourth own goal of the season! If only those home goals had been in the opposition net we’d of ended the season with a goal difference of +31 instead of -17.

It has been a pleasure watching the 2’s this season and I can’t wait for September to do it all again.