Cheadle Town 0-2 Chadderton

Cheadle Town have exited the Division Two trophy with a somewhat chaotic home defeat at the hands of Chadderton. Here's Polardin's take on the game, with additional words from Paul Lynch to follow tomorrow [Sunday]:

The first half of this was a well-contested, end-to-end flowing football battle. The heavy pitch lead to some heavy tackles that the referee ignored; in doing so he lost the players' respect - the idea that you can foul because the referee doesn't care was very much the order of the day....

Despite two goalmouth scrambles where it would have been easier to score than miss, Chadderton did miss. Despite three first-half cracking efforts by Deano, Broky and Lindon, Cheadle couldn't score either. A bundled effort for Chadderton meant 0-1 at half time.

The second half started with the same momentum; it was beginning to be one of the best games I've seen. Then an offside denied Chadderton a 2-0 lead, followed by the save of the season by Mellor. Then a brawl in our box with both teams losing discipline that was ignored by the referee which led to incident after incident with every tackle veering on a fowl, and after every fowl, lots of verbals.

Maybe then it was, with hindsight, inevitable that when Deano was pushed in the box and it didn't result in a penalty, Deano would end up being sent off for dissent. In addition, handing Barry and our manager red cards while yet another brawl was being carried out in the centre of the pitch just seemed ridiculous. We were down to nine men and what was a great game was descending into farce. I almost forgot - during all this they scored again to put paid to Cheadle's Div 2 Trophy campaign for this season.

The only thing the referee did right all day was to blow dead on 90 mins, but in doing this he still managed to ignore the extra 10 that had been lost due to his erratic behaviour!

This could have been a 'game of the season' but in the end, the referee had his day...and it is him we'll remember and not the game....

Photos from the day can be seen by clicking here