Away Days: York Street

How many fans were there?

Over 1200, although Lincolnshire's finest tried to reduce the numbers just before half time when one of them went completely over reacted to a nothing incident. From what I saw, one lad had his baseball cap chucked on the pitch by his mates so he went up to the fence to try and get it. One of the stewards nearby said it would be no problem but the policeman said no and pushed him back unnecessarily, of course then the lads mates and people around him had a go at the policeman so he just charged his baton. As soon as he did this the rest of the police and the stewards got involved just to calm it down. He lost control completely and there’s me thinking that police are supposed to uphold the law not break it. After the game one of the stewards we were talking to said that he could not believe what had happened: “If he had just let him get his baseball cap none of it would have happened. The police went completely overboard”.

And what was the atmosphere like among the 1200?

It started ok, but got better after the incident before half time. The away end was pretty full and we had another hundred or so sitting down to the left of us. We all seemed to get behind the players, but we had to do so something as it seemed that it was twelve against ten on the pitch.

What did you make of the ground?

I felt like I had travelled back in time 20 years! The terracing at the away end was the best part of the ground, even though it was like climbing the north face of the Eiger. The rest of the ground looked like a typical lower league ground with the stands very close to the pitch. It looks like some money has been spent on it but not enough.

Was the referee right to send Cliff Byrne off?

No way. I think the tackle deserved a yellow card and nothing more. Byrne was late, but the red card just summed up the very poor performance of the referee. If Byrne had made any serious contact then Greaves would have been carried off but he just got up, after the red card had been shown.

Why did Lawsy take off Paul Hayes when we were down to ten men? We had no outlet up front. Ghandi on his own at times just disappeared, and at times looked like he wanted the game to finish - he is just not the type of player to play up front on his own. I would have played on with the formation we had, Stanton moved to centre half with Sparrow filling in at right back and Ghandi on the right winf. That seemed to be doing ok, and if we needed to take someone off then I'd have taken Ghandi off as Hayes was giving the Boston defence problems all game. If Paul Hayes plays like that week in week out then Laws has found a good player, he just needs a few goals to let the confidence build up. If the rumour going around that Torps is out for longer than expected, then I think we will need him.

We only had two shots on target all game, was this refelected in the play. Did we deserve a point?

Yes, I think we did deserve a point. Though if we had all eleven players on the pitch then I think we would have got all three. I am not surprised that we only had two shots on target all game, in the first half it took us a good twenty minutes to get into the game. But when we did, we played some good stuff. The state of the pitch didn't help and we could have used the wings a bit more rather than trying to play it through the middle all the time. In the second half we took the game to Boston more and were getting on top of them before Byrne was sent off, then it was back to the wall time. By the time we reached their penalty area they had enough players back to defend because there was no support. If we did mount an attack we made sure that we did not over commit.

The officials were all from the Premiership list, what did you make of them.