St George’s 1 Dandy Town 2

Dandy Town came from a goal down to beat St George’s in a Dudley Eve group C match at Bernard Park yesterday.

Ryan King put St George’s ahead in the 34th minute but Town replied through Cecoy Robinson and substitute Dashun Butterfield, with St George’s finishing with ten players after Kurtis Minors was sent off for questioning the referee’s decision.

Town coach Aaron Denkins dedicated the win to the memory of Kirk Butterfield, their former player who died last Monday. A minute’s silence was observed for Butterfield before the start of the match.

“Firstly, we wanted to pay respects to the family of Kirk Butterfield,’’ Denkins said.

“We wanted to make sure that we played the game in honour of him and his family. He was Dandy Town at heart and we played with him on our minds.

“What we told the team at half-time was to settle down and play the ball. We were rushing a lot but once we settled and played we were the better team.

“We had a lot of openings, there were a lot of players running forward and we were trying to jam the ball to them. Second half, we just told everybody to pass the ball around, five or six passes then we can get forward.

“Second half you should have seen more possession from us, more switch in the play and in the point of attack.”

Jarreau Hayward, the St George’s coach, was not disheartened by the defeat given he was missing a number of players.

“It’s the first game of the season and we were missing a lot of players, but the players here right now had more than enough to win the game,’’ he said.

“Maybe there was a little lack of fitness with a bit of naivety in set pieces that let us down today but that’s what the Dudley Eve is for, to give the guys an opportunity to learn and give us time to figure out what we want to do.

“It’s not necessarily painful and today was a learning experience. We can still progress through and today we didn’t lose, we learnt.

“We've got to work on defending set pieces and that’s going to come up in the upcoming sessions. We will be all right, we’re lacking a lot of key players, around 14 players were missing today. We’re really looking forward to the fixtures and today was really positive for us.”

St George’s started brightly and got their reward 11 minutes before the break when Manoj Paynter’s lovely footwork on the left side saw him cross the ball for King who scored from close range.

Town made three substitutions at the start of the second half and those changes paid off as they started dominating their opponents with Robinson equalising in the 57th minute after good work from Tomiko Goater.

Just as the match looked destined to end in a draw, Butterfield thumped the ball in from a corner to win it for Town.

SCORERS

St George’s: Ryan King

Dandy Town: Cecoy Robinson, Dashun Butterfield