Sun 31st Oct.2010 – Reivers v Lakelanders
Morpeth Reivers hosted Lakelanders today in the second round of the National Masters 50+ cup competition and managed a 5-0 victory. The scoreline does not tell the full story however as for the first 10 minutes Lakelanders were the stronger of the two sides with Reivers floundering trying to gain possession and string some meaningful passes together. Fortunately during this period Reivers defence of Ithurralde, Gardner, Laidlow and Barber were quite switched on and weathered the Lakelanders storm. Reivers eventually settled and began to play big boys hockey you know the game where you pass the ball to a player with the same coloured shirt on as you. this tactic managed to confuse the visitors and allowed Steve Crute to open the scoring in open play with a fine drilled shot in the corner of the goal.
Reivers now on tune and attacking with increasing frequency putting the Lakelanders defence under all kinds of pressure resuting in several short corners. from one of these Evans netted Reivers second goal TVZ injected to Crute who slipped the ball right to Matters who, after drawing the defence squared the ball to Evans to tap in. The third goal game from another short corner but this time route one TVZ inject to Itherralde who took one touch before hammering the ball into the corner of the Lakelanders goal. 3-0 at the interval
The half time oranges supplied by TVZ obviously had some effect because Reivers came out in the second period in the sam indomidable form not allowing their visitors any time or space on the ball and jumping upon every little mistake to regain possession. It was only a matter of time before Reivers added to their score and this came when Matters attacked from the right of the circle and had a goalbound shot deflected but unfortunalely for Lakelanders it was deflected directly into the path of Evans who made no mistake and slotted the ball home. Reivers were totally dominating the game now but credit to Lakelanders they never gave up and continued to try to play the passing game but Reivers were just too strong and eventually Matters got his reward for a fine game with a poachers goal from 6 inches.
All in all a fine performance and credit to our new skipper Micky Christopher who had the courage to stick with the attacking 4 3 3 formation. Jim Gardner had the game of his Reivers Career in the opinion of this corespondent and deserved his man of the match nomination. Unfortunately the vote went against him and Evans was voted man of the match by the committee.
