Fettes Delight: Recipe for disaster or a match made in heaven?

We started with a fairly defensive setup—compressing the midfield to avoid the Uni running us into the ground—and it worked wonderfully for the first half with the opposition becoming increasingly frustrated as the game went on.

We knew that chances would be sparse so it was disappointing when a great move seemed to have left Montague with a tap-in at the back post. Despite Monty's dive he wasn't able to get enough on the ball and it spun agonisingly past the post. Still, encouraging signs.

Meanwhile the opposition were unable to cause our defence any real problems, with Wils working hard in midfield, and Ede and Bunker mopping up the occasional threat. As the students discovered, pace is no use when you don't have the ball.

No score before half time but we were pretty happy with the way the game had gone. There was no doubt that the Uni were going to come out in the second half and work a lot harder than they had done so far.

Monty made up for his earlier miss by latching on to a pass from Dodkin and scoring a cracker from a fine angle.

It took quite a while before the students managed to breach our defence, with Batch stopping corners and open play shots with apparent ease. But eventually they broke through and got the equaliser.

A draw would have been a fair result but it was not to be. And their winner was absolutely bizarre.

Batch had closed down their forward who lobbed the ball gently over the keeper's head. With Bunker and Ede behind the ball you would not have expected this to be much of a problem, but the ball evaded their sticks and rebounded off the post before hitting Ede's leg and dropping into the net. A ridiculously sad way to lose a fine game.

I promised Miles I wouldn't linger on his misfortune so I will only say that any flying insects in his house are perfectly safe as his fly swatting is pathetic :-)

We rallied back well and should have won our first corner of the second half in the closing few minutes but unfortunately their umpire was unsighted and our last chance disappeared.

We set up to frustrate the opposition, but it kinda backfired as we ended up being incredibly frustrated by a most unfortunate turn of events. However it's a good sign that we are now able to challenge this side and now need to focus on the Plate final over the next few weeks.