Denied By Dodgy Decision

After 118 minutes of football, having taken the lead, gone behind and then drawn level, having matched our opponents and soaked up the pressure, pulled level with only 3 minutes to go, it all came down to a bad decision from a linesman!

Appearing in our second cup final of the season, we were up against some pretty strong opposition in Aquachain. They’d already won the First Division, losing only one game in the process and they would have been the pre-match favourites going into the game. But having tasted defeat in our first final, we weren’t about to go down without a fight!

We were missing one of our strikers and so had to adapt a formation that would allow us to battle in the midfield and hit them down the wings. And it appeared to work as we limited them to few chances and then, against the run of play, took the lead just before half time when our striker lobbed the keeper from 25 yards.

In the second half they equalised but as neither side could find the winner the match went into extra time. Aquachain took the lead in the first period, but with four minutes to go in the second we equalised and the game looked like it would go to penalties.

But then with just less than two minutes to go, as Aquachain moved forward, the linesman failed to spot a player standing in an offside position in the penalty area and when he received the ball he had an easy task of scoring.

It was an absolutely sickening way to lose. All of the players had given 100% for 2 hours and we had been more than a match for the supposed superior opponents and we can hold our heads high knowing it could have been different if the linesman had just been paying attention!

There’s a proper match report over at Medway 2000’s website