Stone Dominoes 2-2 Cheadle Town

Thanks to Paul Lynch for the match report
What a wonderful afternoon's football and what a wonderful pitch to play it on!

When you consider that we didn't trouble the Stone keeper for the first twenty minutes, you realise that this was a well earned point! The truth is that whilst we were awful in the first half and had one real chance in that time, Stone were awesome in the same period and played some wonderful attacking football, which kept us pinned in our own half.

We kicked off and were one-nil down within five minutes, when Baz Cotterill misjudged a header and it went straight to James Curley, who gave Mellor no chance with his shot. Our first corner of the game produced our one effort on goal - which was duly despatched to the back of the net by Arron Riley's head and we went in a little embarrassed 1-1 at half-time.

To be fair our lads came out fighting in the second half and we started to play a bit of football ourselves: a couple of efforts on target by Baz Cotterill and Andy Mcdonald from Deano's pass and then Mike Myers got in on the act but shot wide - this was 100% better than the first half and the young Stone side seemed to get a little rattled.

This was becoming our best spell of the game and just when we thought we would score - Stone did! Danny Brown, who for me was Stone's best player, fed off a misplaced pass by Rob Brocklehurst and smashed the ball past Mellor in our goal.

But the lads kept battling away and Brocky almost made amends with his header just going wide and with the next attack we equalised! Mike Myers beat his man to a long pass from Ben Roberts and crossed to the six yard box where Dean Martin slid the ball past the Stone keeper to make it 2-2!

Then on the 75th minute a rash challenge by Deano got him sent off - so we knew we were in for a rough last 15 minutes with ten men.

Trevor sent on Carl Buchanan for Mike Myers and Scott Flanagan for Scott Clarke just to add some fresh legs for the battle to come - but the lads managed to repel everything Stone threw at us and we even got lucky when a Stone player hit the post with Mellor beaten in the dying seconds!

You can't beat a Cheadle Town game for excitement!

TEAM: Mellor, Clarke (Flanagan), A Roberts, Cotterill, B Roberts, Riley, Brocklehurst, MacDonald, Heath, Myers (Buchanan), Martin. Subs: Buchanan, Brokenbrow, Flanagan.