Stevenage 5s 2 - 2 Hertford 5s

A scrappy and rather disjointed game was redeemed by a tenacious fightback, coming back from 2 down in the last ten minutes, Arjun starting the revival with his first goal for the 5s to crown a clear Man of the Match performance, and Tor (who else) slotting delicately past the keeper with 2 minutes to go. That's number 8 for the season.

After a couple of bad defeats, we're short on confidence and rarely using the short passing game that serves us best. We're reluctant to move up the pitch together for fear of being caught out when we lose the ball, and that becomes self-fulfilling when there are no passes on. In the first half Stevenage looked in control, pushing a midfield belt up across the pitch and pinning us in our own last third. But we defended tenaciously, and when we did get the ball past their midfield, there was plenty of space on the break and on balance we probably had more of the few clear cut chances. The best work came down the right with DPJ anchoring along the touch line.

A slightly flukey deflection saw us go behind just after half time and we rather lost the plot after that, forgetting our marking completely as the second went in around 50 minutes. A typical scene was a good clearance to a lonely Tor on half way who had no options on at all but to hold the ball up and then play it 20 yards back to Andy.

With 10 left a slight reshuffle in midfield and a couple of non-program substitutions shook us back into life and we finally imposed ourselves, breaking repeatedly up the left with Arjun and Rian, though the two goals both came from crosses from the right.

Full marks for character in the end, there's planty of ability out there, still some work to do on getting it all to gel.