A mixture of young and old made up this years Men's Reserves. The 20 yrs and under- Dan, Mat G, Cam, Colin, Elliot, Scott, Jack and Mat B teamed up with the over 30's Karl, Clive, Geoff, JR and Wiz, and Trent who fell somewhere in the middle!
Also in the initial squad were Thomas, Marty and Cameron S who all played for us when needed throughout the season.
Pre-season was successful with wins over Waiuku reserves (2-1), Tokoroa Firsts (3-0) and a draw with Norwest Utd reserves (1-1).
This form was taken into the first league game, with Puke winning 6-2 over Mt Albert Ponsonby. A first game hat-trick to Jack was the highlight of that outing.
The next few games didn't go to plan as the team struggled to sort its positional play and structure out, bringing losses against Onehunga Sports (0-2), Three Kings Thunder (1-3) and Central Utd (2-4).
It wasn't until round 5 that the team won again, easliy accounting for young Eastern Suburbs side 2-0. It should have been more but shots were not all finding the target.
The next match was by far our worst performance, and against one of the best teams it wasn't going to end well. Conceding a goal in the first 30 seconds opened the flood gates and we were pounded 7-0 by Wetsern Springs Wanderers.
Uni Mt Wellington were our next opponents in which proved to be the first of 2 interesting encounters with them. Puke went down 2-0, and the incident reports told the story (of which I won't go into again...)
We beat Three Kings Utd 1-0 the following week, in the last minute no less, but the first of our 2 best performances of the year came next, when we took on unbeaten Ellerslie at Michaels ave. The team really stepped up and played great football in an absolute mud-hole, taking an impressive 3-0 victory.
A 2-2 draw in the return leg against Mt Albert after that was one of our most disappointing results, player coach Wiz missing a penalty which would have snared all 3 points.
The best performance and result was the next match against another unbeaten side- Three Kings Thunder, who were eventual winners of the league. We set a game plan which didn''t quite work at first when we failed to score in the first half with a strong wind at our backs. Turning to face the gail in the second half we changed our plan and it worked to perfection- counter attacking gave us 2 goals in 20 mins and although 3 Kings pulled one back we held on for a great victory. When the league finished we were still the only team to beat them, so that was the most memorable highlight for me.
It was up and down for a while after that, a loss to Central (2-3), a win against Eastern Suburbs (1-0) and a loss to Western Springs (3-0), which wasn't bad as they thrashed us in the first round, and another loss to Three Kings Utd (1-2) who had improved a lot since our first meeting, although the ref certainly helped them on this occasion.
We also has a brief cup run during this stage, which got us more injuries than it was worth. In the first round we scraped past a plucky Otahuhu team, winning on penalties after it was 4-4 at the end of 120 mins. We were knocked out in the next round by a skillful Sth Auckland Rangers, again going into extra time but falling 2-1. In that game we lost Trent with a broken leg (and a red card!!) and Clive with concussion after he dived to head a ball in our box and got his head volleyed by their striker!
We then had a win by default against Onehunga and a 1-1 draw with our mates from Uni Mt, which was fairly much a repeat of game one against them with some abuse and interesting behaviour. Fortunately an AFF official was there to witness it all.
The last game of the season was a catch up game against Ellerslie, and we were looking to finish on a high, and at least beat one team twice in the year. It was 0-0 at half time although we had shown some promise and should have been at least 3 goals up. The second half was dominated by Puke, and we ended up 3-1 winners. A satisfying way to end the season.
So, it looks at this point that we have finished about middle in 5th, not as high as we initially wanted, but in a team with lots of talent but not so much experience at senior level it was a fair result.
With a number of our talented players hopefully stepping up to the firsts next year, and some older ones hinting that they wil be playing age restricted football, the reserves will be a very different squad yet again, but i'm sure they will be just as competitive.
With the strike power we had we really should have scored many more goals than we did, but goals for the season (and cup games) went to Jack Crane (12), Mat Bent (8), Tony Wisnewski (5), Scott Wilson (3), Elliot Clark (2) and 1 each for Jamie Hampton, Colin Case and Cameron Hale.
So that's that. Thanks to all the players for their efforts, and to the parents, partners, friends and family who came to support us throughout the year.