Firstly, thank you to the 30 or 40 supporters who travelled to Quorn yesterday either on the coach or independently in such terrible weather, a good distance away and little prospect of a result on paper, so thank you for your commitment.

Three years ago today Leon Taylor passed, I’m sure he’s loving what the club are doing - RIP Son

On the back of 14 consecutive wins Quorn were bound to be in a positive buoyant mood. However, we’d worked hard over a long time to be in a position to enjoy games like yesterday and we were adamant to enjoy the challenge.

I’m not going to use that cliché “we had a good first half and they had a better second half” rubbish as anyone at the game saw, it was a tough game played in good spirits. I’ve said before the final score is immaterial to me, we obviously wanted to win and I/we did everything to try and do that but the reality is yesterday was again about benchmarking where we are as players/team/squad/club and the reality is we’re doing just fine. 8 of the 16 players in yesterday’s squad were 20 years old and under - its a joke stat to have in our position, incredible in my book, Quorn lost a forward last week to suspension and bought in Billy Kee, oh the woes!

This is the calmest I’ve ever known our squad to be, probably due to the lack of expectation and pressure, we’re unbeaten in 75% of our games so far this season compared to 82% last season when promoted from step 5 and 88% when promoted out of step 6 in 21/22 season, so considering the gulf between step 5 and 6 and step 4 I’m hugely proud by our resilience, qualities money simply can’t buy.

It’s important as a club we don’t find excuses in players missing, refereeing decisions etc etc.. we need to simply concentrate on grafting hard, learning and improving. The world is full of boring sob stories, over the last 3 months we’re showing great maturity, learning and calmness and less crazy empty pointless emotions, it’s an absolute pleasure to be around.

It’s hard to pick out highlights yesterday as over the 100 minutes we were all a treat, Big Bish was unplayable and young Bails became a legitimate 1st team player with a great performance yesterday having bided his time with unreal attitude - but there was 5 or 6 who were top draw and everyone gave their all.

We now have a 2 week break from league action that will see us drop out the playoffs but will give us time to rest up and get ready for December’s games.

Tuesday we travel to Sutton Coldfield in the Birmingham Senior Cup, hopefully we have you there with us supporting us, if not I’ll see you in two weeks.  

UTD 

Dean.