WESTERN FOOTBALL LEAGUE
Buckland Athletic 1 Torpoint Athletic
YOUNG midfielder Will Hall scored his first goal for the Buckland Athletic 1st XI as they drew 1-1 with Torpoint Athletic.
Manager Dan Hart was “Glad to see him get the monkey off of his back”, sharing an anecdote about Hall. “He came off a couple of weeks ago and he was disappointed when Will Hughes scored for the club with his first touch and he said he’d been waiting two and a half years”, so for him to score now is rather fitting.
It was a strike from range that saw Hall give the hosts the lead at Homers Heath, firing into the bottom corner and out of the reach of the Torpoint goalkeeper.
There was one other chance for Buckland in the first 45 with Jared Lewington at the heart of it but overall, it was a stop-start, bitty half with very little to report on.
The visitors came out firing after the break with Owen Haslam and James Rowe linking up against their former club, the latter sending an effort into the side netting. Shortly after, the third of the three familiar faces drew Torpoint level- Ryan Richards heading down and into the ground, the ball bouncing out of Adam Seedhouse-Evans’ reach and into the net.
Hart was full of praise for the opponent, highlighting the shift in the flow of the game. “They’re good people at Torpoint, they’ve got good experience and they’re good motivators. In the second half, it was a very different game.”
Plenty of drive followed from Buckland as they went in search of a go-ahead goal but to no avail, the score remaining at 1-1 right through until the final whistle.
Discussing the game on the whole, the Bucks manager commented, “It’s obviously frustrating when you lead at halftime, not to go on to get the three points. Torpoint are resurgent, they’ve got a really good team here now, including a few of the players that were with us and have now returned to that squad.”
He added, “We’ll be hopeful that they’ll continue to take points off of top teams throughout the rest of the season and it was, as expected, a very different game to the one we faced at The Mill earlier this season.”
Whilst the aforementioned changes affected the game from a Torpoint point of view, Buckland had their own problems to handle. In Hart’s words, “We’ve had lots of illness throughout the week, even myself, fortunately Rafael [Beadman] has managed to get through 90 minutes even though he hasn’t managed to operate or work or do anything this week.”
“Myles James has obviously missed the game completely. It’s quite tough, when we’ve been playing with such rhythm and actually having a settled 11 on the pitch- it’s been difficult to rip that up and play in a different way today but we did it.”
Facing that triumvirate of former players, Haslam, Rowe and Richards, “Only helps preparation because you know lots about them, they’ve played games for us, but Torpoint are a side that have got 15 or 16 individuals that we know pretty well.”
Buckland will be playing in front of their own fans once again in the next outing as Nailsea & Tickenham visit on Saturday, February 15. At the time of writing, four points and four places separate the pair in the Western Football League.