North Down fifths crashed out of the league cup at Strathearn last Saturday at the hands of a strong Annadale fourths team.\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s what the match card said.<\/p>\n
Yet again a sluggish start from the Comber men gifted the home side a two goal advantage in the first quarter.\u00a0 Not any individual fault just a collective lethargy.\u00a0 The second quarter was much better and North Down started to move the ball about the back where both\u00a0Curtis Hastings\u00a0and Davy Moreland had solid games in the middle.\u00a0 North Down had a number of short corners and\u00a0were very unlucky not to halve the deficit.<\/p>\n
The fifths continued to press in the Dale final quarter with nice interchange play down the left from\u00a0Angus Johnston\u00a0and\u00a0Johnny Proctor who\u00a0squared the ball to the flick spot and Simon Wilcock cracked home a stunner high to the keeper\u2019s left and into the roof of the net. In the dying seconds of the half\u00a0Roger Graham\u00a0made a wonder save to keep it at 2-1 at half time.<\/p>\n
In the third quarter North Down continued pressing but despite\u00a0James Stewart going agonisingly close the score remained 2-1. The away team were definitely looking the favourites to score the next goal and so they did.\u00a0 With some tenacious tackling in the middle from\u00a0Peter Shields the ball was fed out to the right to Shea Kelly\u00a0who slipped a great ball to Johnston and his sharp pass into the circle was superbly finished by\u00a0Greg Bell\u00a0low to the keeper\u2019s right.\u00a0 All square and it was game on.
\nAt this point Annadale took off all 3 of their Junior 4 players and finished out the match with their Junior 1 outfit. North Down were tiring and Dale finally took the lead with 15 mins remaining.\u00a0 Dale 2s proved too strong and scored a breakaway goal against a two man defence as North were pushing for the equaliser that would see them through but it wasn\u2019t to be and the final score was 4-2 to Annadale.<\/p>\n
Adam Skelly played most of the match at left back and the young Bangor man gave everything he had.\u00a0 He has a great work ethic, does whatever is asked and isn\u2019t shy to get stuck in and was just pipped for man of the match by Davy Moreland.<\/p>\n
Burch Autos Man of the Match:\u00a0 Davy Moreland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
North Down fifths crashed out of the league cup at Strathearn last Saturday at the hands of a strong Annadale fourths team.\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s what the match card said. Yet again a sluggish start from the Comber men gifted the home side a two goal advantage in the first quarter.\u00a0 Not any individual fault just…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-match-reports","category-mens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10745,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10744\/revisions\/10745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}