City 2-2 Hemel Hempstead

[Padz]

Wednesday night sees Hemel visit Court Place Farm.

A much changed side in the last week, they've got a new manager and signed about 6 or 7 including the familiar face of David Perpetuini and well known Paulo Vernazza(ex-arsenal,watford)

tricky one to call, City to edge it 2-1

[hedges]

If we didn't use get out of jail card the other week with the 2 pens to kick start us, we definatily used it tonight.

What I saw was a Hemel team that most certainly is not going down, they out played us, won second balls, controlled the tempo for over 3/4 of the game and frankly should have desimated us.

First half they had chnace after chance after chance, good job for once I stood down the club end first half behind the city goal as that was where all the action was, we had one chance on goal and fluffed it at the other end, bar that nothing.....where as Hemel hit the post twice and bar once and luckly for us also fluffed all there other chances, which included having a stone wall pen for handball waved away....we should have gone in at half time anything between 3-5 -0 down. We gave them to much time and space and they made us look like a mediocre team taht has played 3 games in 6 days....which I don't concider much of an excuse since its the same for most teams at the moment.

Second half was an improvement, we came out started closing down, got afew rugged tackles in and managed to dig-in abit, until finally Hemel got there break through, worryingly however we still failed to create a single chance on goal in open play in the second half , It took the refs intervention and a Sav pen, which he cooly dispatched to draw us level.

After this point there was abit of a turn around, Hemels heads dropped and they seemed to look abit more ragged and Oxford started to play more 'normally'....we even managed to create afew decent chances, one of the best chances was denied becuase two city players got in each others way. Then you could say the enevitable happened and Hemel score in the 89th minute....

But Respect to City and the players, they played the next few minutes with urgency and really went for it and with abit of luck got the equliser, not only that but they had a fantastic chance to win the game outright with the last kick of the game....which of course would have been nice.

Lady Luck was on our side tonight, we didn't play well at all against a resurgent team with fresh talent in the ranks we were made to look distictly mediocre.

[Mark Neal]

good look on things hedges.. was very poor tonight. we lookes out of place and couldnt play our passing game im afraid.. i wonder if tireness is playing a part..

Brackley _> Truro away -> then Banbury 2 day later... -> then Merythyr..

Anyway ill be there staurday hopefully we will beat the russians. A.KA. BRACKLEY TOWN

[ONLOOKER]

Well said Hedges this is how they have played for some time .When we get a settled back four then we can begin to build on that ,but for some reason Fordy picks a different four every game surly he must know his best four but for some reason he leaves his best center back on the bench ,once again when Gunny came on you could see the difference .Come on fordy what ever has gone on for the sake of the club put Gunny in from the start and leave the tinkering to somebody else

[Padz]

certainly was a very poor performance, we got ripped to pieces in the first half luckily both posts and bad finishing saved us an embarassing half time score.

I agree that Gunny must play, he's our best defender and part of the 'spine' (Gunn,Savage,Steele)

See the Brackley match thread for the team i would choose for Saturday

[pudss]

Harding got you something out of the game, im a hemel fAN and i have to say i was very very impressed by his performance, although we still should have scored at least 4 goals, a very entertaining game, good luck the rest of the season

[DavidB5]

I agree with Onlooker, why does Fordy not start with the best back four and team. Leaving Andy Gunn, Dave Savage and Mark bell on the bench is crazy. Also substituting Mark Janes and leaving Jamie Brooks on takes some believing. Only when Fordy brought on the three substitutes, especially Gunn, did we show any signs of getting back into the game. One other point is, Fordy screaming at players, especially the younger players does nothing to improve their confidence.