The pitch was very heavy yesterday, cut up easily and can't have been easy to play football on. Accepting what others have said about it not being our best performance of the same, it was the sort of game we would have lost in previous years. Remember the 6-1 at Altrincham a couple of seasons ago on what must have been a fairly similar pitch?
I think our first half was a bit disrupted by the injuries to Miller and Steer, and Stalybridge were the best side at that point. They went in 2-1 up at half time with their second goal being an unstoppable free kick into the top corner. Great effort and good goal, but what was the free kick awarded for? When the ref blew I actually thought he'd given a foul on Newsham.
In the second half we dominated possession and Stalybridge looked more like the away side, attacking us on the counter. When they made it 3-1 I thought there was a possible offside in there, but the assistant kept his flag down. I was sat that side of the pitch and to be fair the linesman got several offside decisions wrong for both sides.
Fairclough scored a great goal to bring us back to 3-2 and then Newsham tapped in from close range to equalise. We deserved the point, but even then King had to make a couple of good saves for us to keep it. It was important we didn't lose the match after defeat in the previous two, and if we can follow up with seven points from our next three against Histon and Telford then we'll still be in the mix. Not sure how bad the injuries are to Steer and Miller though, so we might need to shuffle things around.
One other grumble from yesterday - not directly related to the football, but interested to know others' views nonetheless. The rain absolutely lashed down after the game, making the journey home extremely difficult. The M6 was as busy as I can ever remember. There would have been lots of Christmas shoppers heading home and the Manchester United match had just ended so all their fans were travelling home to Weymouth, etc. (Yes, there really was a Weymouth bus with a Manchester United flag in the back of it). It was the shortest and therefore darkest day in the year, and the amount of rain about, spray on the road and volume of vehicles made it into one of the worst journeys home from football I've ever had. At times you could barely see beyond the end of your own bonnet, and it took me twice as long to get home from Stalybridge as it did to get there. Yet there were sections of the M6 which have street lighting but where that lighting wasn't turned on. I know we've got a national deficit to address and I know there are political and financial reasons why lights are being left off, etc. but isn't there a time and place when we can leave the street lights off? Yesterday wasn't it. Somebody somewhere is going to die as a result of travelling in conditions like that. What price do our politicians put on human life? Sorry, went off topic, but that journey home really annoyed me!
