Feast and famine on the 3G

Today was a bad day at the office for the Reserves against Hyde United. The visitors were far hungrier and went away with an 8-1 win, Francesco Frangillo scoring the consolation for the reds.

The Lancashire League is used by FC United to give young players an experience of open age football, to see which can cope with the physicality of playing outside their peer groups. The result is often feast or famine, sometimes both. In just over 50 games played in the South Division this season, one third have seen teams score five goals or more. In most cases sides have conceded five as often as they have scored. A look at the league website http://full-time.thefa.com/FixturePublicGrid.do?divisionseason=938746910&league=1848526 shows that for Buxton and RIASA South both games have provided high scoring wins for the away team.

Success is measured by the movement of players to first team squads and for FC United the movement of Sam Baird, Steeve Eddy and Mike Jones represents a level of success that is not seen in many seasons. Unfortunately this does put extra pressure on the players left behind. The team that turned out against Hyde were almost all First Year Academy students and does see some playing out of position as we come to the end of a season.

The bare statistics are dominated by a four goal display from ex red reserve Tunde Owolabi, who scored four of the Hyde goals. Tunde played in our first season in this competition, sometimes receiving rave reviews for similar displays in a red shirt. He was released for the fact he was a one man example of the feast or famine principle. Often he would fail to score for the fact he was not in the position he was supposed to be. Whether that was because opponents could cope with the fact he was totally reliant on his right foot or is why three years on he is still playing reserve team football, only he knows.

No-one at FC United wants to take away the pleasure he would undoubtedly have taken from the performance, but would say that if you like unpredictability in your football watching then FC United Reserves will continue to provide it for you. What we look for is not to guarantee such results won’t happen in the future but that the players who can learn from what happened and make sure they are not involved again are given their chance to perform at a higher standard.