Bognor Regis Town 0 v 2 Enfield Town

[cityboy]

Bognor's frustrating season continued on Saturday as high flying Enfield Town visited the lane.
A Friday night recall saw Sam Magri return to Havant, forcing Robson having to play carrying an injury.
The bigger, more physical visitors had the better of the early play and should have been ahead in the first minute as they had a one on one with Tolley in the Bognor goal but blasted high over the bar. Despite their early pressure; Bognor weathered the storm and slowly grew into the game. Some sweet inter passing saw the hosts look stronger going forward; whilst Joe and Issaac caused problems down the left but like so many times this season the final pass was lacking.
On 34 minutes Bridgman cut into the visitors box; was blatantly fouled for a penalty; but the man in black had other ideas much to everyones amazement. Ball played long down the visitors right( nicely controlled by the hand and missed by the lino) a inch perfect cross and in the space of 1 minute 1.0 down.
Time to regroup; but no yet again this season Bognor push the suicide button. Tolley makes a good save but a magnificent volley on the rebound 2.0 !!!
2 goals in the space of 2 minutes game over😡😡
2nd half Bognor came out and had a go, Gifford should have done better but blasted well over when well positioned. Lots of huffing and puffing but lack of quality in the final quarter meant Bognor created little.
Overall a disappointing performance.
Bognor now have some big games coming up in the next 10 days. Brightlingsea away; Herne Bay away and Margate at home all teams below us. To avoid being dragged into a relegation quagmire the Rocks need to be picking up points and at least avoid defeat!!

[rockfan]

Good summary above. Can't comment on the hand ball as I was too far for a good view. Had a perfect view of one of the clearest penalties all season and cannot believe this was missed by the officials. The Enfield 14 also constantly fouled and this was ignored - he then told the ref 'no f***ing way' on an offside so loudly the entire ground heard it but took no action. I can only hope that the ref was assessed on his performance and will be demoted accordingly.
Bognor need to pull together and keep it tight for the next few games - we need to build from clean sheets.

[ronnie]

Completely underwhelmed I’m afraid. We play nice tippy tappy football with absolutely no cutting edge. I don’t know if Robbie’s hands are tied someway with our loan players but two down at half time and not bringing on our strikers, especially Pato, was seriously poor.

Five losses in a row, we’ve only beaten a very poor Bexhill, we seriously need to change it up and go more direct, otherwise we’ll be scrapping relegation 😞

[stuartcoles]

The good thing about forums is you can say it how you see it.my personal view from the angle I had in line with the 18yd box was it wouldve been a really soft penalty on Nathan who in my opinion ran into the defender as much as the defender blocked him.that being said it may have looked far more blatant from a different angle.we should not however have been carved open so easy anyway for either goals,due to pushing up too much and then being done for pace.fair play to cass for controlling the volley as well as he did for the 2nd.i felt it was just one of those days where we wouldn't have scored even if we played for another 90mins.the positive for me was despite creating very little,bar 2mins of rashness we matched a side who will probably make the play offs at least,therefore maybe we aren't as far away as results may suggest from being decent,perhaps just a little naive.the next 10 days should tell us a lot with 2 long away days followed by the proverbial poor travellers of margate at home.i feel 5 points is the absolute minimum required from those fixtures.heres hoping I have a better trip to brightlingsea on Tuesday than our last Tuesday night there when we got stuffed 3-0.COYR

[mistral]

With the disallowed penalty & Dan missing an open goal, it would be easy to write it off as "one of those games" but unfortunately the same could be said of any number of games this season so I can only conclude that there are problems running deeper than just bad luck. Against Enfield we suffered from naive defending leaving the back door wide open & we only had one player who was able to compete physically with a big strong team & that of course was Robson indeed the highlights for me were seeing Robbo flatten their forwards with strong but perfectly fair tackles. We were also timid with substitutions making just one initially & lastly but by no means least, at 2 down in the second half we tried to pass our way through a packed defence of big strong players. Apologies for being so negative, thank goodness we already have a decent number of points so just a win or two should keep us safe from relegation. I would not criticize the players as they are clearly doing their utmost but looking ahead Robbie needs to consider how he can change things for next season.

[stevebone]

Here's a report from Liam and some pics from Lyn, Trev and Tommy - www.sussexexpress.co.uk/sport/football/enfield-too-strong-for-bognor-and-rocks-suffer-fifth-straight-league-defeat-4051544

[kof]

This may sound strange but I was reassured by Robbie's frank and honest post-match interview, in that it's obvious he knows precisely what the failings are and what it takes to be successful in men's football rather than academy football, e.g. strength, physicality, gamesmanship count and may count more than just skill. Whether we can recruit players with the blend of qualities and experience remains to be seen.