Alvaro Padron, Craig Albrightson, Shane Kubota, Peter Hoving, Ruben Oggel, Joaquin Herrera, Mark Hogberg (70 – Chris Seaton), Todd Koning, Chris Stockwell (65 - Jose-Maria Blanco (67 – Danny Lim)),  Steve Black (60 – Dave Budd), Ozzy Ubor

Unused Subs:

None

Rangers have been a bit of a gimme team of late and so it was with a section of trepidation that we prepared to have a go a possibly mid-table German All-stars side.  As usual, our disorganized approach manifested itself in an easy early goal to put us behind.  Ironically, this soft goal might have worked in our favour, lulling the opposition into a false sense of security at having put a soft one past the league whipping boys.

Thankfully, some curt yet fair words from our managerial position holder before the game had helped to instill a sense of unity and somehow boost team morale, which is to say, gave us some.  This being the case, despite the aforementioned calamity, heads didn’t drop.  We played some decent ball.

Then Steve, who is from England, passed to Mark, who might be too and he then scored a very nice goal.

Then possibly Naughty Chris made a very pleasant cross which found Toddy on the back post, who put the ball into the goal with his head.  He’s rather good at getting into good positions and good with his head too.

Then, Chain Gang, who is in my mind quite a silky defender, played a skilful ball to Steve.  Steve, who also has a classy touch, then preceded to steamroll the ball towards the opposition goal.  Finally scoring a rather mashy but pleasurable one.

Then, due to the defenders generally eating kippers, we conceded 2 fairly quick goals.  That stung.

Thankfully, all the lads were in the mood to dig deep.  The passion desire and effort were clearly tangible.

Then possibly Joaquin played a nice ball to Aussie.  A pretty much mirror image goal of Mark’s then proceeded.

We won.

It felt really good to win for the first time this season.  Good on the boys for digging deep and pulling this one off.  It’s possibly too early to claim that we are out of our slump but it’s definitely encouraging to get a win under our belts.

Man of the match goes to Steve.  Actually I don’t think I have any say in the matter but if I did, that’s what I’d say.

Toodles.

A Further Note From Blacky:
I was going to edit Craig’s match report and add my bits in, but my narrative style does not quite match with “toodles”!

Firstly, I’d like to say that the young referee had a very good game and showed considerable maturity to control the game.  Obviously we never agree with everything a referee does, but the first signs were positive and we wish him the best of luck for his future career “in black”.

My second note is more savoury and one that may cause some friction, however I must make note of the incident that occurred after an hour of play when Rangers made a substitute and brought on Chema to add fresh legs to the team.  Unfortunately, his time on the pitch was limited to about 40-45 seconds as he ended up taking a slight nudge to the back before he was hit head-on in a collision with the opposition.  Anyone with any sense would have realised that this was a nasty clash of heads, but to our considerable dismay we heard raptures from the German bench.  We are still not sure of the reason for this, be it strange German humour (that we all struggle to understand anyway) or just the adrenaline on the day, but all I can say was that it was disgraceful to say the least.  Chema left the pitch immediately with a nasty gash to his eye and went straight to hospital and the atmosphere on the pitch (and sideline) turned slightly sour.  To be fair, the German players that we talked to after the game were just as dismayed at their team mate’s reaction, so we can only hope that something was lost in translation.  Enough said.

On a final note, the players really gave everything against the Germans and deserved earning their first three points of the season.  I was pretty harsh on the team at the start of the game, but everyone played as a team and dug deep when it mattered.  While I am flattered and honoured to receive the man-of-the-match award from Toodles, my man-of-the-match award goes to Shane who had a massive game at the back.

Well done fellas

Blacky
Managerial Position Holder