This blog has ended up being three weeks late due to my US Open tennis blog and other work commitments. Old news as they say. Anyway, I have never been to Telford away and now I am located back in the Midlands there weren’t too many excuses I could think of for not going. A 45-minute drive and I was in business, apart from the fact I didn’t turn up where I thought, I basically screwed up the directions on my phone. Don’t ask me how but I ended up in the middle of nowhere with an overgrown pitch. Not sure how even I could get it this wrong! I would like to say it was their old ground….it wasn’t. It was then a mad dash to the New Bucks Head, luckily parking was easy enough and free. I had got my ticket online and after a quick body search, I was there. They do love to check under your cap the stewards at these places, maybe they mistake my ponytail for a flare.
As it is my first Hereford match of the season, I was going to start forming my opinion of what the new recruits were like. I couldn’t help but do a bit of digging on Zeli Ismail, Miles Storey and Mitch Hancox as they have played at higher levels and was interested to see what I thought of them in particular (Ismail and Hancox both started on the bench). The first half was probably shaded by the hosts, who managed to hit the post and put one wide but we had our chances with Storey firing just wide and Ryan McLean ran half the length of the pitch only for the keeper to push it wide for a corner. I am still trying to work out if we should have had a penalty from a Luke Haines cross which looked like Elliot Durrell might have thrown his arm into. We didn’t and that was that.
In the second half, the lively Kai Samuel Williams fired just over for Telford and then Hall made a smart stop to again deny the striker but after that, I thought we were relatively comfortable. If I am being honest I thought we might nick it in the last twenty minutes. Klukowski had a shot deflected just over when it was goal bound and the introduction of Ismail and Hancox came halfway through the second half. The first thing that Ismail did was take on their fullback and he just went past him like he wasn’t there. Effortless. You can see that he has a lot of quality and why there was so much fuss when he was a young lad at Wolves. I like the fact that both he and Storey look direct but it still remained goalless despite our late pressure.
A point wasn’t the worst result in the world over the 90 minutes but we do need to start picking up more points/wins. It hasn’t sounded great the last few weeks with the loss to Spennymoor Town and the draw at Lymington in the Cup. Hopefully, with the addition of Pearce at the back and Hulbert upfront, we can look a more finished article. COYW.
Al Davies.
The Gubbage and the Glory! 