Thurrock-March 2012 results

Hello friends, welcome to another month of my Thurrock story updates. Luton will be running away with the BSP title for sure this season. So it s up to the rest of the teams to challenge for the 4 play-off places. The table is very tight at the moments with 7 or 8 teams with a real chance of landing the chance to promote to league 2. We are lying in 6th place but with 1 or few games more than our rivals.

There will be a lot games to play for this month, 7 in total. Here is the results..

I am pleased with what we achieved for this month considering the strong opposition that we faced. We were unbeaten for the whole month and have 3 wins and 4 draws. But at this stage of the time, the draws is definitely going to affect our chances of claiming the play-off place this season. We were without our most influential player Kevin Macdonald for this whole month. I forgot to mention that he was injured in the last game of February and will be out for few weeks. With him around, i believe we can probably turn those draws into wins.

First game of the month was against Kidderminster a mid-table team, we managed to apply a lot of pressure on them in the first half. We took the lead through an own goal and Kiernan Hughes-Mason doubled the lead to give us a two goal cushion. It was 3-0 in the 61 minutes with Paul Hakim the scorer. They try to come back into the game and gave my team a real scare when they scored 2 goals to make the score 3-2. Luckily with a couple of good saves from my goalkeeper, we managed to held on and win the game.

York is one of the teams that is chasing for a play-off spot. It was a difficult fixture for us as they have some good quality players in their ranks. They came to our stadium with an attacking mentality and i got to change to counter strategy to handle them. Regardless of that, they still took a lead in the 26 minutes. Our performance was better in the second half and after waves of attack, our efforts were rewarded when my substitute David Knight  smashed in the equalizer in the 84 minutes.

Northwich is currently struggling in the bottom half of the table and i expect my players to win this match. While Kevin Macdonald is injures, i had to depend on Josh Falkingham to create the goals for the team. So far he had performed well, he gave us the lead in the 8 minute. But we couldn’t hold the lead and it was 1-1 till the break. The game carried on with us the dominant team, but we are unable to break down their defense until i introduced Kiernan-Hughes Mason from the bench. His silky runs was rewarded with 2 goals and gave us a vital win.

It was the first of difficult games against the top four teams and our opponents for this match is Histon currently lying in 3rd place. I was surprised to see that we won the game fairly easy. Even though they had a slightly better percentage of possession than us but in terms of chances created, we were far better. As  a result, we won the game by 2 goals.

We need to travel to 4th place Crawley for our next game. I am approaching these games with a standard strategy, not as defensive as what i employ in the early season and we never fail to score since the defeat in January. We had a magnificent first half, took a 3 goal in the first 26 minutes. Kiernan Hughes-Mason is in incredible form claiming his first hat-trick for the club. They managed to claw 1 back  in between those goals. With the support of their home fans, they put us under pressure for a couple of times and get their second goal in 50 minute. We tried to hold on to our lead but was disappointed to find ourselves conceded a late goal. The game ended in a draw.

It was tremendous atmosphere in the stadium against the leader. The stadium was almost half filled with the fans and it was the highest attendence that we ever have so far. With the fans voice going behind us, my players wouldn’t want to disappoint. We gave them something to cheer about when Kiernan Hughes-Mason scored his 11th goal to for the club. But with Tom Craddock the BSP top scorer in their ranks, they can overturn any results easily. Our lead only lasted for 16 minutes and Luton equalized through Tom Craddock. We seems incapable of containing him, he always managed to score against us.

Last game of the month was against our rivals Ebbsfleet who is few places below us. We suffered a embarrassing home defeat to them back in December and i definitely want to set the record straight. They won’t be willing to lose in front of their home fans either. They seem to settle into the game pretty fast and we found ourselves a goal down in the first half. I told my players not to disappoint the fans twice, they fought hard and finally got the equalizer in the final minutes of the game. We still can’t get a win over them.

I thought we did quite well overall for this month but  an unbeaten month doesn’t propel us up the table. We dropped to 7th place instead, this shows that the rest of the team is not dropping as much points as we are. We still have a fighting chance for that last play-off spot and my players will keep on fighting until we are out of the race.

There is still 5 games left to play for us, we need to perform well and hope that the results of our rivals go our way. Can my Thurrock team defy the odds to claim that last play-off place? Please come back to find out in my last post of 2011/12 season of my Thurrock story. I will see you soon.