Yeovil Town will face MK Dons in the first round of the FA Cup… IF…. IF…. the Glovers negotiate the 4th Qualifying Round replay against Taunton tomorrow night.
Alan Smith and Dion Dublin made the draw with big Dion drawing the Glovers away in Milton Keynes.
Cheers, Dion!
Yeovil Town’s Under 18s striker Benjani Jnr has signed his first professional contract with the club.
Having been something of a goal machine for the young Glovers last season and in the early part of this season he has signed on to become the team’s third professional player in three years to come from within.
He follows in the footsteps of Toby Stephens and Ollie Haste who have made the step up to the first team squad.
Benjani has already represented the first team in the successful 2021-22 Somerset Premier Cup campaign but will be hoping to make a mark in the upcoming months across all first team fixtures.
Benjani is the son of former Portsmouth and Man City striker Benjani Mwaruwari.
A huge congratulations to all involved!
On today’s episode of the Gloverscast, Ian and Ben are joined by Rich Willcox-Smith to talk about the 0-0 draw with Taunton and we take your questions.
Tickets for the FA Cup fourth qualifying round replay at Taunton Town have gone on sale to Yeovil Town supporters.
The club has received an allocation of 300 tickets.
There is no seated allocation available to away fans for the tie at Wordsworth Drive on Tuesday night (7.45pm kick-off) and will be available to season ticket holders only, limited to one ticket per person.
They will go on sale from 10am on Monday and, if tickets are still available, the Huish Park ticket office will remain open until 7pm.
The club statement added: “Because of the short turnaround on sales, tickets sales will only available be in-person from the Ticket office or by calling on 01935 847 888. We will endeavour to answer as many calls as possible but it may not be able to answer all calls. Please have your season ticket details on hand when purchasing tickets.”
However, the club are not expecting to receive printed tickets from Taunton until Monday evening – so, if you pay for a ticket in person, you will not be able to collect it until Tuesday morning.
You will be able to collect them from Huish Park until 4pm on Tuesday or alternatively you can collect them at Wordsworth Drive “by the away entrance which is in the car park towards the Fire Station” from 6.45pm.
Tickets are priced at the same level as Saturday’s match at Huish Park, namely:
Adults: £15
Concessions: £10
Under-18s: £5
There are no details of any travel put on by the Green & White Supporters’ Club, but it seems likely they will adopt the same policy as last season’s fourth qualifying round replay at W*ymouth and assume most people will make their own way up the A358.
If that changes, we will let you know.
Tickets for the FA Cup replay at Taunton Town on Tuesday night will go on sale to season ticket holders only, the club has confirmed.
In a post on its Twitter channel after Saturday’s goalless draw, the club said it expected to receive “a very limited capacity” for the match and promised further details “in due course.”
If the police allow the stadium to operate at a theoretical 2,500 capacity, which seems unlikely, the maximum allocation would be 375 – so probably bank on it being a bit lower than that. Our guess is the allocation will be around 300 people.
On Sunday lunchtime, the National League South Peacocks provided an update to its own supporters saying that details were for its own fans only adding that “Yeovil Town FC will manage their own allocation“.
Tickets for home supporters were priced at £15 for Adults, £10 for Concessions and £5 for all Under 18s, which probably suggests the cost of tickets for travelling fans – but we will wait and see.
The match at Wordsworth Drive – or the Cygnet Health Care Stadium, if you like sponsored names – will kick-off at 7.45pm.
The Taunton update adds: “Supporters are reminded that any form of smoke bomb or pyrotechnic is strictly forbidden inside the stadium. Any person identified breaching this regulation will be notified to the Police and be subject to an immediate football banning order.”
Watch this space for details on tickets for away fans…..
Yeovil Town Under-18s picked up a convincing 6-0 win at home to BRS Coaching Youth at Alvington yesterday.
Having opened the scoring after just six minutes through Jacob Shore, the young Glovers failed to add to their advantage before half-time.
But on 52 minutes Charlie Bateson doubled the advantage before Josh Sutton added another three minutes later. Mason Hunter scored twice in the space of three minutes before a 70th-minute own goal completed the scoring.
The result was another heavy defeat for the Ringwood-based visitors, who only joined the South West Counties Youth League this season. They have already been beaten 11-0 by Bridgwater United and 7-1 at the hands of Cirencester Town.
The result keeps the young Glovers in third place in the table with five games played although with some teams only playing once, it’s difficult to figure out exactly what that means.
The club’s Under-14s, Under-15s and Under-16s all picked up wins against Mid-Somerset Regional Talent Centre in the Junior Premier League.
The Under-13s lost to the same opposition. All the younger age group teams, from Under-11s to Under-16s, play as part of the Yeovil Town Community Sports Trust.
The FA Cup has always been an important competition to Yeovil Town – who still hold the record for the most League club scalps as a non-League club – and this season’s campaign got underway with a 0-0 draw at home to Taunton Town yesterday.
The final whistle was met with boos from the stands at Huish Park and a recognition that it will take a journey up the A358 to the county town for a replay on Tuesday night if Chris Hargreaves’ men are to make it to the competition’s first round.
It was a hard watch for any Yeovil fan and here Rich Willcox-Smith, who some of you will have heard on last Friday’s podcast was in the away end this weekend, gives his conclusions…..
Yeovil were slow to start: After last weekend’s impressive 1-0 home win over a decent Solihull Moors side, I was expecting Yeovil to come out with an extra spring in there step but actually they were very slow to start. For large parts of the first half, they were second best to a side sat a division below them. The crossbar was the Glovers’ friend to save them going into the half-time interval a goal down. Taunton midfielder Ross Stearns effort hitting the woodwork gave the Yeovil back line a sigh of relief. The big frame of Ben Richards-Everton is usually enough to scare most forwards. But today he looked like he had met his match in visiting striker Nick McCootie.
Players looked uninterested and frustrated: The first shot on target for the home side did not come until a minute in to the second half, by which time Taunton had called Grant Smith in the Yeovil goal in to action on a number of occasions. There was at least a fr*st*a*t*ion [the F-word is still banned here, Rich – Ed] from the Glovers players which could easily have been described as many of them looking uninterested. Presumably something was said in the dressing room at half-time – possibly ‘have a shot’ – but it was still limited to efforts from outside the box and not enough to test Jack Bycroft in the Taunton goal.
The lack of goals is concerning: Building upon my previous two points, we saw Malachi Linton, Alex Fisher and Jake Scrimshaw – the three out-and-out strikers in the Yeovil Town squad – and there was very little to threaten. No Charlie Wakefield isn’t a striker. It is now 14 games in to the season and 13 goals have been scored with our top scorer is still left wing-back Jamie Reckord. For context, that’s exactly the same number we scored in the first 14 games of last season when our strike force was widely considered as powder puff. Yeovil could still have been playing come Sunday morning and no goals would have come, the only saving grace from that is that Taunton didn’t really give Grant Smith much to do.
There’s no Plan B: The plan yesterday seemed to be to play the ball sideways and back, there was very little going forwards and even when Fisher and Scrimshaw came on, it seemed to be the same tactics and nothing to try and take on a fired up Taunton side. We can only hope that seeing the Peacocks in the flesh will give Chris Hargreaves something to work on in the 72 hours before the replay – otherwise, it’s difficult to have too much confidence going in to the replay.
The final whistle was toxic: The final whistle was met by boos from the home supporters in the biggest crowd of the season at Huish Park. I could hear it over the cheers coming from the away supporters, so it must have been loud! I’ve not heard anything like that since the dark days of Darren Way’s time as manager and our slump out of the Football League. I thought those days were gone, but it looked – or more to the point sounded – like they were back with a vengeance yesterday. To be fair, it’s hard to argue with the response of the paying public – that was one of the poorest displays I have seen from a team playing in green-and-white.
Toby Stephens made his debut for Plymouth Parkway on Saturday after making his second loan move from Huish Park.
Stephens, who had spent a couple of months with Truro City where he found first-team minutes hard to come by, played the full 90 minutes and a pivotal role in Parkway’s 1-0 at Harrow Borough in Southern League Premier Division South, the same division he played in with table-topping Truro.
The Parkway side also included two former Glovers with striker Ben Seymour starting and ex-academy talent Pedro Borges on the bench as part of his loan deal from Exeter City.
Congratulations on the win, Toby.
Yeovil Town midfielder Matt Worthington says his side need to ‘up their game’ in the replay against Taunton on Tuesday after the Glovers were held to a 0-0 draw in the FA Cup.
Speaking to BBC Somerset’s Sheridan Robins after the stalemate, he used a word we’ve banned on the Gloverscast, so we’ve used some asterisks…
“A replay on Tuesday is not ideal, I don’t think we hurt them enough today, it was difficult at times as they put a lot of bodies behind the ball and we had a lot of possession, we needed to open them up a bit more and drag them out a try to hurt them which we didn’t do.
“We’re very fr*str*t*d, but we can go and win the game on Tuesday.
“We started slow in the first 20 minutes… they had a couple of chances but we improved in the second bit of the first half, we had a lot of ball and I feel we should have capitalised, so yeah, very fr*str*t*d.”
“Us midfielders were getting the ball deep and us midfielders were struggling to break them down, but yeah… fr*str*t*ng”
Thankfully, that was the last of Matt’s use of ‘that’ word. He gave Taunton some credit, but admitted that the replay would require more from the squad.
“Fair play to them, they had a game plan of staying in the game as long as they could putting bodies behind the ball trying to make it as hard as possible for us as they could and they did that, so credit to them.
But we need to be better opening them up and scoring goals.”
“We need to up our game on Tuesday, 100%, it’s going to be a difficult game again at their place so, we need to be on it.”
Worthington said that he hoped the fitness of the Glovers would help with the quick turnaround and said how much he was enjoying playing with ‘freedom’ in this Chris Hargreaves side.
The Glovers will find out their potential first round opposition on Monday evening before heading across the county on Tuesday evening for the replay.
A disappointed and annoyed Chris Hargreaves said his Glovers side were ‘nowhere near good enough’ after National League South Taunton Town held Yeovil to a 0-0 draw at Huish Park this afternoon.
The part-timers held their own against Yeovil and the draw means a trip back on the A358 to Taunton this Tuesday in a replay.
Speaking to BBC Somerset’s Sheridan Robins after the match, Hargreaves said his players’ decision making was wrong at moments and that the Glovers didn’t ‘mix the game up’ enough.
He said: “It’s disappointing today. From the highs of beating one of the best teams in league [Solihull] last week and then today. [There was] not enough quality in the final third and [we] didn’t play the conditions or the opposition well enough. Credit to Taunton, I thought they set up really well, but extremely disappointed with that.
“They had openings where we’ve made the wrong decision. Some of the lads are still learning and we could have been punished. We had opportunities where we also probably made the wrong decisions in the final third, which we haven’t been doing. We’ve been very good in the main, especially at home.
“We just didn’t mix the game up well enough. We didn’t go long when we had to and we didn’t play when we had to, we got those decisions wrong. That’s something the lads have got to learn about each other. When I’m making changes and putting players on, play to their strengths. That’s what we didn’t do. credit to Taunton, they were very good on the day, we weren’t and that’s what can happen in the cup.”
Although it’s a short trip to Taunton Hargreaves said he didn’t want a replay with a busy National League schedule coming up. He praised Taunton for their performance and creating a difficult challenge for Yeovil.
“I thought the fans stayed with us as long as they could, it’s always a difficult challenge. We’re expected to roll a team like that over – I played in plenty of games as a player when you’re playing against Premier League and Championship opposition and it’s not always the case.
“We’ve got no divine right. You’re playing against a team with a lot of ex-pros in it and a lot of lads that have played at a decent level, so we knew that it was a tough opposition especially after they had a negative result [5-0 defeat against Ebbsfleet] in their previous game. It always raises an opposition ten fold. They had a good following. So all the elements were built for that resilient performance.
“But we weren’t good enough, no excuses on that, nowhere near good enough for the standards we’ve set, certainly at home.”
On to Tuesday then eh? The banana skin just got more slippery.