“I will loan you three wishes …”
MAIDSTONE UNITED 0 BRAINTREE 2
Match Report by MESUT GOATFUCKER III
“Shit show” was the word doing the rounds at the EPIAC last night and as ever, it was referring to a lot more than just the football.
We’ll be covering this in due course, but our mole at the ground reports there may yet be room for optimism, as our MP is backing us to the hilt and will be taking the matter up with the authorities just as soon as she’s finished voting to ensure we can trade with genocidal regimes. (Insert your own National League Board zinger here.)
Realistically however, there seems a strong chance this was our last match for a while at least. It’s at times like this that we can be grateful we have a fan base that doesn’t over-react to an isolated poor performance; that accepts it in its wider context, and that understands that it was a bad day at the office. Albeit the office you’re forced to work in because your boss doesn’t give a shit if you get the Billy Ray and that The Sun accused you of being bone-idle for not working in during the middle of the pandemic that unfortunately still hasn’t killed everyone who works for it and all its readers.
But we digress. What went wrong last night? It’s tempting to conclude that news of another possible shut down affected motivation levels and there was a distinct Eastbourne-last-March vibe about the atmosphere, but this is an easy excuse. If this really was going to be your last 90 minutes for a month or six, wouldn’t you want to go out in a blaze of something slightly above mediocrity?
The starting line-up might be described as “experimental” and as experiments go it went about as well the tests on Christmas Island, with a commensurate level of fall-out. (That’s right ladies and gentlemen, appropriate levels of perspective right there.)
There was no Handsome Catalan Bloke (?) There was no Frightening Maltese Bloke. Seeeamuuuurn was at left-back, Noah was on the bench, Hoyte was in the middle and Mundle-Smith was on the right.
It was the sort of game when we could really have used a fully-fit Joe Ellul (or even a partially fit one to be honest), because we were mugged off/bullied/made to look like a right bunch of cunts etc, etc.
Braintree went ahead from an admittedly well-taken free-kick after a foul in the D and from then on the subtlety of their tactics was in inverse proportion to their effectiveness. Stick almost everyone behind the ball, hoof it downfield when necessary and wait for set pieces: almost exactly the approach that saw us through the last few minutes on Saturday.
At 1–0 we had one great chance when Porter was played in and the keeeeepaaaaah saved at close range, but The Big Cunt in the middle could throw the ball like Alex Flisher and the confusion this caused resulted in their second goal, Ruth glancing the ball into the far corner of his own net.
Hoyte looked all right at centre back, especially when running at the defence. The only draw back was that he didn’t have Hoyte at right back to pass to and this meant our crossing was below par for most of the evening.
However, Amaluzor, the match-winner in this fixture last year, looked as bewildered as Roger Daltrey, manhandling a lorry full of trout into a car park at the Tunbridge Wells border crossing and trying to explain why he didn’t have the correct paperwork for the Kent Access Permit to the Sussexfrontierpolizei.
Saidou was yanked at half-time and was seen talking glumly into his phone during the second half, the kind of behaviour that once got Paddy The Greek into trouble with JS1, what seems like a very long time ago.
We did look livelier after the break, in much the same way that Himmler’s corpse looked livelier for a few moments when the Allied medics were trying to revive him than it had a few seconds earlier when he was deathspazzing on cyanide. (More appropriate levels of perspective right there ladies and gentlemen).
Olutade nearly did his trick of scoring within minutes of coming on, but the keeeeepaaaaah denied him and the ease with which the Braintree defence was opened up proved misleading. There were a couple of weak efforts, the odd half chance, lots of possession and not a lot to show for it.
Hak apologised in his post-match interview and luckily everyone accepted this was an isolated performance that shouldn’t be allowed to tarnish an encouraging season, allowing us all to move on.
