Yeovil’ve won eight in a rooooooow! Yes, another three points on the board and the Glovers are now three points clear at the top of the National League South table.
They left it late to clinch them with defender Morgan Williams rising highest to head home a Jordan Maguire-Drew free-kick with seven of 12 minutes of second half injury time played at Worthing to earn a 2-1 win.
Here’s now Dave saw it from his vantage point in the away end at Woodside Road….
The hoodoo is over. Our ability to stick by the latest podcast rule of not speaking about <REDACTED> pitches is going to get a whole lot easier after this performance. Having been at Hemel and Havant & Waterloovile where we suffered our only defeats of the season (I don’t need to tell you what is similar about those two stadiums, do I?), this performance felt like a statement. There were bobbles, overhit passes and the odd error, but overall we looked as different as night and day to our previous two outings on……well, you know.
Mark Cooper got his tactics spot on. This was not a rampant Yeovil Town performance as we have seen in recent weeks, this was the controlled, patient, we know what we’re doing, just trust us Yeovil Town. For a huge amount of the game, not an awful lot happened and the home side enjoyed an awful lot of possession, but Mark Cooper got his tactics absolutely spot on. In the first half, Worthing did very little to threaten Joe Day’s goal and, whilst we had only a handful of efforts on goal, we always looked the more likely to score – and did, of course. The second half saw both sides have more opportunities, but I never felt like we were not in control. It might not always be swashbuckling and entertaining, but the Mark Cooper way feels like the way we’re going to get out of this division.
??Safe to say Mark Cooper enjoyed that one. #ytfc pic.twitter.com/4v75U1F1o2
— Gloverscast ?⚽️? (@gloverscast) October 21, 2023
It looked like we’d be punished for our wastefulness. When Ollie Pearce’s 86th-minute penalty hit the net, it was difficult not to feel like we had shot ourselves in the foot. If there was a negative about this performance it was that we had the chances to have made it a lot more comfortable. Jordan Young had a few opportunities, Jordan Stevens was denied by legs of the hosts’ keeper and don’t even get me started on the referee and his inability to see Rhys Muprhy getting wrestled to the ground inside the box. If this had ended as a draw, we’d be talking a lot more about that, I suspect.
If there was one player who didn’t deserve to be a villain, it was Jake Wannell. Just a few minutes before he was the victim of what appeared a soft penalty (even through my green-tinted glasses) was given against Jake Wannell, I had messaged my fellow Gloverscasters to say he was “absolute class.” Forgive me a little bit of a love in, but this lad is powerful, so assured on the ball and his partnership alongside Morgan Williams is becoming as important to us as any other part of this team so far. If his collision had led to us losing two points, it would have been a real injustice to him.
Picture courtesy of Mike Kunz.
It’s only three points, but… It’s also eight wins (nine including the Somerset Men’s Premier Cup) wins in a row, it puts us three points at the top of the table and it’s a win over a side who you’d fancy to be in the play-off discussion come May. It is only the end of October and no-one ever won anything at this stage of the season, but these type of performances and results are the ones which we’ll look back on come the end of the season……if we end up doing something good, thank is. Now where did we put those seagull botherers?