Mount Merrion 2 – Dunboyne AFC 1

Disappointing result this morning. I’m not too sure how much I’ve explained about the coaching I’ve been doing over the past few months but here’s a brief outline. Around mid-September I started to coach an under 10s team from Dunboyne AFC. Some readers (if there are any ;)) may remember I used to coach a 13s side from the same club. Since September we’ve been playing games and training pretty regularly. They are the third team of their age group at the club so most of them aren’t natural footballers but they give it their all. The weather over the Christmas period and most of January has been quite bad so we haven’t had a game in almost 7 weeks. That brings us to this morning….

All we knew of Mount Merrion was that they are the team above us in the league so we knew it’d be a tight game. There are a few teams in the league who get hockey scores every game. They’re the type of football clubs who can fill 2/3 teams with quality players at any age group. They probably train harder and take it more seriously so fair play to them. The game with Merrion was, as we thought, a balanced affair but unfortunately we gave away two sloppy goals in the first half. They don’t have the best positional awareness at this age so we left players free for the goals. We can work on that though. The start of the second half was much better and we pushed on. Rob got a break of a ball from one of their defenders and did really well to hit a left foot shot past their keeper into the top corner. The rest of the half was very scrappy and we couldn’t find an equaliser. A positive point from the game was the fact that the lads (and girls) didn’t stop running and after a lengthy lay-off that’s an achievement. The first victory is coming. 🙂