With a mid-afternoon 3pm pushback, Old Southendians travelled to the Braintree 3s with the hope of a much better score than our previous encounter with them.

Within the 6-7th minute into the game, we were showing a strong and confident side with Matt putting the ball through to Nick giving us our first opportunity of the game, they came straight back at us with a great interception from Will cleared up by Mark stopping their chance of scoring.

We continued with good pressure for the next ten minutes with great encouragement from Simon on the sidelines, momentum was going our way and we got our 1st short corner, injected by Tim with Will unfortunately narrowly missing but not long after this our moment came and put us 1-0 up with Tim scoring.

The game continued back and forth until the umpires shocking decision to give them a penalty flick making this 1-1. We continued to keep focused and keep the pressure on, with an early ball out from the back by Paul to Tim then on to Nick who then scored making it 2-1 to us. Not forgetting the great volley from Neil saving them from scoring.

Going into the second half, they scored straight away catching us on the break to make it 2-2. The game continued the same as the first half with end-to-end chances for both teams. However, with another questionable umpiring decision whilst we were attacking that could have affected our game, we did not let it this effect our performance and what a run by Nick from the halfway line only to have his shot saved. They came straight back at us resulting in Neil having to slide to the edge of the D to stop them scoring.

Braintree kept up the pressure with a well worked short corner resulting with them lifting the ball into our goal making it 3-2. We were straight back at them with a short corner to us with Will scoring a cracking goal only for it to be disallowed with another questionable decision by the umpire! Still with great energy levels by everyone we got another short corner with a bullet of a shot by Will to make it 3-3.

Great game by everyone, too many names to mention individually but everyone gave 110%.

Bring on next week’s game.

Match report - Riley
Man of the match - all 11 players for the monumental effort!