Mossley 1 - 2 Wakefield

The final home game of the season should be something approaching a last hurrah - an opportunity to send the supporters into a football free summer with a happy memory to bide them over till it all begins again in August.

It should but sadly you also get games like this where you hope upon hope that it doesn't put people off coming back again for good. Crowds are low enough as it is at this level of the game without providing potential supporters with a reason to find something else to do on match days in case they should ever witness another game quite as bad as this again.

Actually it wasn't that bad if you were following the fortunes of the away side, but for those who turned up hoping to see the hosts put in nothing more than a decent performance, never mind claim all three points, it was the latest addition to the recent list of wasted afternoons.

Prior to kick-off it had been six years since Mossley had last won their final home game of a season. And throughout the course of this ninety minutes against Wakefield it was a statistic that never looked like changing to anything other than seven.

The corresponding fixture of the 2007/08 campaign - a goal less draw which, coincidentally, was also against Wakefield - was possibly one of the most boring games witnessed at the Lilywhites home ground for many a year. Twelve months on and this game looked like surpassing it in terms of tedium until a goal out of the blue put the visitors ahead in the 36th minute.

Not for the first time in the match a Wakefield attack looked to have run into a dead end but a ferocious effort from Adam Jones, stood well over thirty yards from goal, proved unstoppable as it swerved through the air towards the back of the net.

The crossbar and a subsequent goal line clearance prevented the Yorkshiremen from doubling their lead early in the second period but such was the scarcity of chances Mossley were creating that the one goal from Jones looked like being more than enough.

That was until a goal just after the hour mark, as equally unexpected as Wakefield's opener, pulled the Lilywhites level. Michael Fish blocked an attempted clearance on the edge of the Wakefield penalty area and the ball looped into the path of the inrushing Mattie Kay, who hammered a low shot past Andy Woods on the half-volley.

Over the following few minutes Mossley had their best spell of the game but other than a Danny Egan header that dropped onto the roof of the net, they couldn't turn the pressure into anything significant and the momentum quickly fizzled out.

Just as many were expecting the game to end in a draw however Wakefield produced a second goal out of nothing to edge them back in front. Again it was another howitzer of a shot from distance that did the damage but on this occasion it was Paul Dempsey who launched the ball beyond the reach of Mossley keeper James Mann.

The response from the Lilywhites to going behind was at a point somewhere between negligible and non-existent. There was little in the way of fight to try and salvage something from the game and as a consequence the match petered out into something akin to a lazy kick around in the park; Wakefield playing out the final fifteen minutes of the game with a comfort normally associated with sides who were three or four goals in front, not one.

For the n^th time too many lately no-one associated with Mossley can have any complaints about the result – the side that looked the vaguely more interested, and played the teensy bit better, won.

What’s particularly galling though is that a little under three weeks ago we not only beat Wakefield on their own ground, but we did so convincingly with a scratch side that had been reduced to ten men for over half the allotted ninety minutes.

I know we’ve been up and down lately performance wise but that surely counts as going from one extreme to another. A mini-downward spiral that can be summed up by the fact that for the second home match running the half-time game involving Mossley Juniors under sevens and eights was the football highlight of the afternoon.

Having now taken just one point from the last possible twelve the Lilywhites will hopefully experience an upturn in fortunes and performances in their final two league games in order to end the season on something of a positive note. And in doing so give us a glimmer of hope in the game against what’s now likely to be a full strength Droylsden side in the Manchester Premier Cup.

I could go on but an unwillingness to let my heart overrule my head type something I may regret at a future date means that this review is going to end here (see, boring defeats do have an upside). I hope amongst hope though that there's something I can be positive about in the final week and a bit of the season that’s left.