Wealdstone 1 – 0 Tilbury
Wealdstone1 - 0
TilburyA little bit of the ‘walking wounded’ for Wealdstone, with Martin Carter, Tommy Williams and Rob Courtnage only just recovering from knocks sufficiently to play against Tilbury, with new signing Alon Hemmerdinger taking a place on the bench.
Stones started brightly but the Tilbury defence was nothing if not effective limiting the Stones to long range efforts from Jolly and Williams and a Rob Courtnage free kick that lead Gordon Bartlett to ask later if it had gone out for a throw in.
Tilbury hustled and bustled in the middle of the park to close Stones down, but they offered little themselves going forward, Charlie Leary, keeping his third clean sheet in four starts, having little to do from their sporadic forays forward.
The first half as a whole was somewhat of a non event, despite the referee booking three Tilbury players in the space of three minutes just before half time, but even from these free kicks Stones failed to create a meaningful effort.
The second half started in similar vein – Wealdstone won a free kick outside the box on the right, but this time Rob Courtnage stepped up and drilled the ball into the far corner of the net on 46 minutes, to give Stones the lead.
This did spark Stones up a little and Marvin Morgan saw an effort go just wide, before on 56b minutes a Carter cross was almost met by a low flying Robin Tucker – the ball was collected well by the visiting keeper but he landed on his head and was knocked out. After a stoppage of over six minutes, he finally came round but was obviously concussed and was replaced by Rees-Brown in goal.
With the traditional goodwill of the season, Stones then spent the next half hour almost entirely with possession, yet the best effort they could test the stand-in keeper with were two crossed, both scrambled away – shots from Morgan, Julienne, Williams and jolly did nothing to test him as the game petered out. In fact, for the last twelve minutes, Tilbury were reduced to ten men, losing Cleaver with an injury having used all three substitutes.
Not a good performance, even after the recent results, but three points!
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