JLEAGUERS: Goals:  Nobutaka TAKEE Assists: Toyokazu YAMAZAKI

Defenders:  Takeshi HIGASHIZONO, Hiroyuki YAMAMOTO, Toshinobiu SARITA, Takayuki AKISAWA, Takahiko WADA,Shinobu SETOYAMA

Well it was close one but no cigar in the end. Spartans army so bold and strong to start with hence 20 players in the end wittled down to small contigent between pull outs, bed strugglers and injuries.

3 pull-out within 24 hours then we kicked off with several still waking up in bed, to our relief Jleaguers looked less than at full strength as well.
Within one half of football I had lost 3 of 4 starting defenders to injury.
JLO groin, Hoy's hand and Streaky to hamstring. Our new center back siging Tunners was welcome relief due to the chaos that was unfolding and gaffa had to come off the bench leaving the reserves restless.

The 1st half was a pretty scrappy affair not much in it really both teams almost nullified one another out. In all fairness we didn't look like we were going to score, Dimitri probably had the best of chances. To our credit Jleaguers though an excellent football team didn't looked like scoring either.

Nil-Nil at half time fair score line.

To compound to our problems Flabbo had an injury and this gave Tim a chance upfront who I thought shined out. The first 20 minutes of the second half we controlled the game, and had a few glarring misses that really haunted us.
We should have really scored during this period the Jleaguers were in total dissarray. Not taking the chances as the 2nd half wore on the Jleaguers started to get more hope. James Fallon who did an excellent job to keep their speedy left winger guy quiet sucumbed to calf muscle injury with about 20 to go. This was the final straw and the flood gates seem to open on the left everytime it went out there.

One of these foraides resulted in Rich making a fine point blank save, showing some of that Spartan spirit. However the pressure untold and with about 5 mins to go another attack on the left found a player running through in the center who calmly put the ball in the back of the net.

To our credit we lifted and came back strong in the last 5 minutes and Tim had several chances to score but could not find the illusive goal. It was good effort, we looked disjointed at times and with several new players in the squad not suprisingly. It took us a while to gel but we did eventually though our conditioning and fitness clearly needs to improve. A draw would have been a fair result in all honesty and losing late in the game is always gut wrenching.

Many appologies to Sanj and Kevin who did not get on, you will definietly have more of runout in the games ahead  I promise.

Bad luck Sparts.