Southampton Rangers 1

PHC Zebras 0

Football coaches whose teams are languishing at the wrong end of the table often claim that league position does not tell the whole story.

Maurice Lowe, the Southampton Rangers coach, would agree with that sentiment and yesterday he finally got a result to reward a fine team performance.

Jesse Seymour’s second-half goal was enough to give Rangers a win over PHC Zebras, moving Lowe’s side off the bottom of the Premier Division in the process.

“For the last month and a half we’ve been putting in a lot of hard work,” Lowe said.

“The performances haven’t been bad, but we haven’t been getting the results, so, today has been very rewarding to get a result to go along with the performance.

“The tables are honest, there’s no arguing against the table, but we think we are a better team than the position we are in.

“The table doesn’t reflect that so, we have to get results like today so that the table can reflect the position we deserve to be in.”

Rangers just about deserved to win yesterday on the back of a second-half performance in which they created the better chances and stifled a PHC team who struggled to muster a serious attempt on goal.

Seymour’s strike 20 minutes from time rather summed up the difference between the two teams, with the Rangers striker taking full advantage of a defensive mix-up between Na’eem Griffith and Daniel Adams, the goalkeeper.

Seymour should have had a second, but Adam went some way to atoning for his previous error by making a fine one-handed save to keep his side in the match.

PHC, Rangers’ tenants, failed to break down a stout Rangers defence in the closing stages, and when they did find a way through McQuinn Burch, the Rangers captain, or one of his team-mates was on hand to hack the ball clear. Not that PHC should have been chasing the game in the first place.

Mark Wade’s side missed a host of chances, including twice in the first eight minutes when Shakir Smith hit the ball straight at Corey Richardson, the Rangers goalkeeper, and then moments later hit the post with a free header.

PHC did manage to put the ball in the net when Cecoy Robinson pounced after Richardson could only parry a Smith shot, but the PHC captain had his effort ruled out for offside, much to the consternation of the PHC bench.

“I’m pretty disappointed with that,” Wade, the PHC coach, said.

“In the first half when we had the ascendancy we need to get something out of it, and we didn’t and in the second-half we really didn’t stamp our authority on the match and paid the price for it. You don’t score, you can’t win.”

Wade does not think that his side will be the last team to lose to Rangers this season and even though PHC could have gone two points clear at the top with a win yesterday, Wade believes the race for the title will go down to the final days of the season.

“I think the league itself, at the moment, doesn’t really reflect the quality of some of the teams at the bottom, I think it will go right down to the wire,” he said.

“It’s a tough league and I think these guys [Rangers] will steal some points off other team’s as well, and if they do that will work in our favour.”