IT was quite apparent from the off that this match was Jersey’s to lose and any chance of that happening was all but over after eight minutes when Connor Lloyd scored his first of two. In all honesty, it has been a long old time since a ‘Muratti’ was so one-sided. It is no insult to say that 4-0 flattered poor Guernsey. As the old saying goes: “They were lucky to get nil.”
Nevertheless, Jersey’s head coach Paul Renton was not entirely happy with what he saw, despite his team’s dominance. The problem for him was it should have been so much more.
“They got a bit of stick at half-time,” said Renton. “We don’t convert a high enough percentage of chances and that can come back and bite us on the backside.”
“It’s a trait they’ve got. They create a lot but they don’t take their chances.”
He had a point. Guernsey would have had no complaints if they’d lost by ten, such was the number of chances that went begging. Jersey could even afford to miss a penalty when Dan Radford saved from Callum Gilroy, though the visitors could feel justified that it ought not to be given in the first place given the soft contact on Lloyd that it was awarded from. Lloyd might also have felt ever-so-slightly aggrieved that he didn’t get the chance to complete his hat-trick too.
The centre-back, who plays his club football for Grouville, was at the heart of everything in the first half hour. He turned in the opening goal on eight minutes from close range, on the end of Joey O’Toole’s long, looping free-kick. As many minutes later he nodded home the second, at the far post from Barry Beatson’s in-swinging corner from the right. Then he won a penalty before he thought he’d sealed his hat-trick, again from within Guernsey’s six yard box, only to be denied by the linesman’s flag for offside.
Opportunities to score presented themselves at will. O’Toole’s cross-come-shot was cleared off the line. Beatson passed up a gilt-edged chance when one-on-one with Radford, then nearly made amends when he struck a wonderful free-kick which hit the underside of the crossbar. Gilroy brought another save from Radford when through on goal.
Eventually the third came, and from probably the most unlikely of sources. With just a minute left until half-time, right-back Coen Le Monnier dared to have a shot from 20 yards and it curled satisfactorily over a stricken Radford.
The game already won, the second half had a tinge of after the Lord Mayor’s Show about it, though the procession rolled on, while chances continued to be passed up. A scramble saw Charlie Brennan and the Gilroy brothers Callum and Leighton have a succession of bites that somehow were repelled by a combination of Radford and the upright. Then, after an hour had been played Tiago Duarte, a bystander all match in the Jersey goal, had his first threat against him but Fin Patterson blazed over.
Beatson, the player of the match in control of the midfield, thought he had scored but his tap in was also ruled offside and more chances were squandered by his team until the very last minute when substitute Stan Dunne slalomed his way through the Guernsey defence and coolly slotted the ball into Radford’s near post.
Despite the disparity in class between the two sides, Renton took extra satisfaction from the win following the controversial losses in Guernsey last year for the U18s and U21s in November and praised the performance of referee Neil Giannoni and his assistants.
“I felt a little bit hard done by in the U21 Muratti in terms of some of the decisions that didn’t go our way, but I thought the officials were great today. They managed the game really well. A few of our lads today played in the U21s and they will be taking a lot of satisfaction out from this game too.
“When you play Guernsey, you always know you’re in for a battle, but we outworked the opposition today and we played some good stuff.
“We were the better side by some distance.”
Jersey: Tiago Duarte (Charlton Lawlor, 88), Coen Le Monnier (Kyle Wilson, 86), Connor Lloyd, Tomas Goncalves, Fergus Boyle (Le Monnier, 88), Charlie Brennan (c), Barry Beatson, Joey O’Toole (Stan Dunne, 78), Leighton Gilroy (Dan Andrade, 88), Conor O’Keeffe (Will Yates, 67), Callum Gilroy
Guernsey: Dan Radford, George Goubert (Rio Bowditch, 77), Ben Wilson, Leon Solano (Tyrese Kelly, 77), George Montgomery (Harry Hodgson, 77), Sam Cooley Tom Solway, 46), Rio Bowditch (Emerson Nobes, 39), Alex Ward (c) (Charlie Coleman, 88), Zac Batiste, Zach Gilman, Charlie Coleman (Fin Patterson, 46)
Referee: Neil Gionnoni (Jersey). Assistant referees: James Lihou (Guernsey) and Charlie Balcombe (Jersey)
