Pre-season Friendly
The Moat Ground, Church Gresley
Saturday, 6th August 2005, 3.00pm
Moat Ground Stalemate
This was a typical end of pre-season affair. Gresley started the brighter and after 12 minutes were testing the Prims defence as first Nicky Carter's shot and then Paul Edwards shot were blocked.
Chris White then went close on 22 minutes striking a volley just over the bar. However, the visitors took a surprise lead ten minutes later when a corner by Dave Cole found Leigh Grant whose deflected effort looped over Gavin Saxby and into the net.
The lead lasted less than a minute when Chris White did well to rob a defender before passing to Aaron O'Connor who had the easy task to side foot the ball into an empty net. On 36 minutes O'Connor then went close again but his shot went wide.
The goal of the game came 39 minutes. Nathan Tate pushed a fine pass through to Carl Slater who, looking up, saw Prims keeper Chris Hudson off his line and curled in a superb 25-yard shot beating Hudson via the underside of the bar.
On the hour Saxby pulled off a good save denying Mark Finlay, but three minutes later the visitors were all square. A vicious shot from Finlay cannoned back of an upright to Warren who hit the ball home from close in.
Carl Adams, on for Tony Brown, almost helped his side to regain the lead. With almost his first touch of the ball he found O'Connor whose first time chip just cleared the bar. Seconds later, O'Connor went close again when he almost netted a Chris Gray cross after sliding in but the ball looped up and over the bar.
Substitute Andy Dunn went close skimming the bar after just coming on and Adams warmed the hands of Hudson with a shot on 76 minutes.
During the last five minutes Gresley had three decent chances to win the game. First Dunn had an effort saved by the keeper while both Tate and O'Connor had shots blocked by Hudson's legs.
Manager's View
"I'm not too interested in performances in pre-season. I've said that before in pre-season games whether we've done well or not. If I'm being honest I wasn't particularly happy with the performance but it was all about getting players on the pitch and trying to gel one or two little bits.
"We did well in patches but overall I was disappointed with the level of performance we put in. I felt we were a little lethargic at times and we didn't really get out of second gear. But, having said that, there were still positives to take from the game. As I've said to the players pretty much before all the games it's nice to win games and it's nice to play good football but nothing is won in pre-season.
"I understand it would be nice to come here and see the side put in cracking performances in pre-season. But we are two weeks away from the start of the season and rightly or wrongly there are one or two players still playing within themselves maybe and that was one of the points I've just made in the dressing room. By players doing that it does slow the tempo of the game down a little bit and it gets a little disjointed. Yes, the performance I'm not happy with but I'm not too fussed at this stage as long as things are right on August 20th.
"Having said that, we've put in some good performances against Tamworth and Leek when the tempo of the game was higher because of the football the opposition was playing. We had to raise the level of our game to match that.
"The difficulty today was that right from the start it did have that pre-season feel about it and, from both sides it didn't have that urgency about it. We tried to address that at half time but it didn't really happen except for a fifteen or twenty minute spell.
"It would be nice to have the whole squad to choose from next week at Whitby because we haven't been able to do that yet. I think most sides have not had that luxury during pre-season. It would be nice but if that's not the case then there is nothing we can do about it. Today we were without Tony Hemmings, Emeka Ejiofor, Gary White, Micky Lyons, Andy Simpson and David Holmes."
