Good evening and welcome to the officials, players and supporters of Maesteg Park Football Club to the Marston’s Stadium for tonight’s MacWhirter Welsh League Division One match. We’d also like to welcome the three officials and we hope you enjoy the game and have a good evening with us.

Tonight is our fist home fixture since the Croesyceiliog league match on October 6th and we can expect a difficult match from opponents who have improved their squad since we met in early September.

The Croesyceiliog game was won more comfortably than the 3-1 score suggests. Early goals by Chris Latham and Andrew Pearson put us in the driving seat and Andrew’s second on the stroke of half time settled the match. The only disappointing feature was that we failed to score in the second half and Croesyceiliog pulled one back.

Since then we have twice had league matches in Gwent and also been to north Wales for our Welsh cup match. Both our league matches ended goalless with Caldicot playing the whole of the second half with 10 men. This made it more difficult for us as they pulled everyone behind the ball and relied on breakaways and set pieces. As the first half progressed it had looked a matter of time before we scored and we were getting on top when the sending off occurred.

Last Saturday’s match at Cwmbran was one of only two in the league and with tonight’s game gives us a chance to catch up on some of the games we have in hand. If we’d been offered a point at Cwmbran before the game we’d probably have taken it but we had the better chances to win the game. However a combination of good goalkeeping and near misses meant we failed to score. On the other hand Wyn didn’t have a difficult save to make throughout the match.

As you know we lost 1-3 at GAP Queens Park, The first twenty minutes was goalless until a clearance hit Carl Evans and ricocheted straight to an unmarked Park player wide in the area, he had time and space to open the scoring. Before this we could have been ahead, Steve Davies hit a volley which the keeper did well to turn away for a corner and Paul Evans had a header cleared off the line with the keeper beaten. Their second on the half hour was from a planned move at a corner and their third was as the result of a long clearance from one of our attacks which caught us on the break. Our goal in added on time was a first for Aaron Keefe.

Finally I’d like to send the club’s condolences to former coach Steve Llewellyn whose father Len passed away a couple of weeks ago. Len despite not being in the best of health in recent years would always spend some time at our home matches. There was a large crowd of football people at Len’s funeral which showed the respect that both Len and Steve have in the football world.

Enjoy the game