On what was another cold night, 12 players (yet again) braved the weather and turned up to play. Only just, mind, with Chris bursting through the door just before it was closed - only to be greeted with a collective sigh as if to say "oh shite, now we have to run".

It was decided that as there were no eligible league games to play, Doc and I would have to play the first duffers match of this season. We picked, then, on reading the teams out, I got a bit of a strange look from a few because of having no runners in the team (no offence to anyone).

No, this game I thought came down to a simple thing - Power vs Speed.

Teams lined-up as shown on the twitter feed, I put myself in goal to begin with, immediately regretting with my performance in the warm up! Luckily it seemed I was just getting the bad performance out of the way as I improved once the match began. The Yellows pressed us early, with the speed and link-up play of Gary, Chris and Paul coming at us from midfield. We defended well though with my solid wall of Mike and Woodsy in front of me. Young Nick and Mark in the centre of the park doing well to track back with the runners too. Alas, (and to be fair to the yellows) against the run of play, we managed to get the scoring underway. A brilliant pin-point cross from Mike lifted it kindly over for Mac to nod in. 1-0! As Mac said, it seemed to float over so nicely, he even had to take his hat off in appreciation of the cross before nodding it in.

Next goal came from young Nick, good running from Mark and nice pass picked out Nick who calmly got himself on the score-sheet. 2-0.
The Yellows did half the deficit after a pass found Gary who was able to give himself a yard or two of space to unleash a shot. I had got my foot to it but the power took it past me. 2-1 game on again.
I swapped with Mac at this point and asked Nick to go up top. What a performance Nick had too, involved in our next two goals, crossing from the left to put it on a plate for myself to make it 3-1 and then after a flick on from myself he ran onto it to beat the defending and ultimately the keeper. 4-1.

The yellows did keep the pressure on throughout the match and managed to get a second with a few minutes remaining through a bit of scramble in the box, it fell to Doc who netted past Mac,

FT: 4-2

Thank you to all of my team, I cannot fault anyone's performance, it's a hard one to figure out a Man of the Match, I think I'm going to have to give it to Young Nick though, he was involved in 3 of the 4 goals.

Good luck to Doc in exiting the Duffers Cup further down the line. Lets just hope there's more players next week!!