Amateur Football Alliance Senior Cup

Kings Old Boys 3 Old Meadonians 1

This report is going to be far and away more compliant with the cutting room scissors than some of its predecessors, since most of the positive action came from the so-called underdogs, Kings O.B., from the middle of the division below, in calmly dismissing Old Meadonians from the Amateur Football Alliance Senior Cup, putting a mini mountain between the A.F.C. premiership side and survival by scoring three goals, one after twenty minutes, one a minute after the half-time break and icing their cake midway through the second half, before Meads could notch a euphemistic consolation through evergreen Jack Costello with just fifteen minutes to go.

The Senior Cup is the big one for all A.F.A. sides in which the visitors, as proud four times holders, should have been bursting to complete their nap hand. However, on Saturday only one team on the pitch at Cheam showed any ambition and that was, in solo flying Meads’ coach Paul Rumley’s rueful and terse summary, Kings who ‘played it like a cup final’.

Pre-Christmas, Meads are now out of two of the three cups they have entered, a situation they have not been in for at least ten years which gives Rumley and his co-coach Rory Vermeulen an indigestible surfeit of food for thought and the squad a deal of self-examination to contemplate. The book says build from the back and that fits the diagnosis for what is becoming a distinctly porous defence which needs urgent shoring up. We will be watching this space.

Squad: Robinson, Costello, Pointer, McCombe, O’Sullivan, Allen, Chapman, Shea, Gowers, Glover, Sawyer, Mace.

December 11, 2013