Ramballs

You’ll know by now that the score was 2-2 and our goals came from Stephen Pearson and Arnaud Mendy. Barnes got a short run out before being taken out of the game by a standard Stoke challenge; high, dangerous and down right dirty. I won’t write a full match report, the official site and therams.co.uk can give you a much better account that I can on a Monday morning.

I would like to highlight some key points from the day:

- The match day announcer got just about everything wrong. Before the game he announced their would be a minutes silence in memory of Sir Bobby Robson. As the ground went silent he said “let’s start the applause”. He also said announced Derby County onto the pitch when Stoke came running out and Derby were still in the changing rooms. Better luck next time Mr Announcer.

- The boo boys were once again in attendance. Giles Barnes received a few boos from the home fans when his name was read out before the game yet Danny Higginbotham got a cheer. Unbelievable.

- Stoke aren’t a good team. We were the better team on the day, by a fair margin I thought, we just lacked the bodies in the final third.

Our passing was good from the start; Bywater was looking to roll the ball out quickly to the defenders, Addison was prepared to come out of defence with the ball, Buxton looked comfortable on the ball and solid at the back, Sav covered a lot of ground and passed the ball well, Green and Pearson both got forward and Steve Davies did well up front although he did stray into midfield a few times leaving us with no one up field.

It’s good to see us playing football. Stoke allowed us to have more time on the ball than we’ll get against Peterborough next week but, providing we keep the tempo up like we did for the first 60 - 70 minutes against Stoke, we should be just fine.

Roll on August 8th.