Not a day to forget, but a day to remember. Plenty of other teams, including us in other games from last season, would’ve downed tools today. They’d have fell out with each other, started fights and got red cards, and have gone straight home afterwards. Instead, we stayed positive throughout, we fought and lost together as a team, and came out of it still managing a smile after the full time whistle. That’s what today was about, about us having the right mentality throughout the game, and going to the pub together and taking the result on the chin. No blame was dished out, we were just beaten by a team who are thoroughly above the standard of even the top division of the Imperial League.

Their manager spoke to our manager and said they’d signed a couple of semi pro players, and then they brought their semi pro mates with them, meaning they were basically a semi pro team. Their number 9 scoring 12 goals shows just how good certain players were for them.

Their quality caught us out early on, scoring 4 goals in 7 minutes after the twelfth minute. We struggled from then on, the flood gates were open and with how clinical they were, we conceded every chance we gave them. However, we really improved after halftime. Moving to a 5-4-1, packing out the central spaces with extra men, we stayed solid and kept them out until a major turning point in Chris Pickford going off with a nasty ankle injury.

Going down to 10 men and losing one of the central players, they began to exploit the gaps again. After they finally broke down our second half defence, another CM came off injured, with Shaw getting a heavy tackle on his bad ankle. A really poor show of sportsmanship from Darnall here, refusing to kick the ball out of play so we could sub the injured player off when they were already 12-0 up. Down to 9 men, it was just too easy for Darnall again, scoring 3 in the late stages of the game.

Today is not a reflection of quality on us, but on them. They have cruised their opening 3 games, and will cruise to the title. We’ve played plenty of Premier League teams the last two years, and not one has came close to doing what they did today. A lot of teams would say forget about this result and pretend it never happened, but it’s important for us to remember how we responded today. We worked as hard as we could until the final whistle went, and left the pitch with a smile on our face. With any result like today’s, there is nothing more a manager can ask for than that.