Report

Many thanks go to Dave Maydew and the coaches and players of Bilbrook Juniors for providing us with this game to make our final preparations before we head to France.

Two games of 24 minutes, brought contrasting fortunes for Wolverhampton and emphasised how big a part luck can play in the result, and also how vital it is to score and finish off any chances that are created.

The players got to see how quickly the 12 minutes of each half passes, especially if a player gets injured, and especially if you are chasing the game.

There were many lessons to learn and hopefully these will help us when Wolverhampton play in the Eurofoot Tournament for the 19th time next week.

We treated the four periods of 12 minutes playing time as two games as it would be in France.

So in the first half of the first game we dominated and created two or three very good chances, we hit the crossbar, the keeper made good saves, and Dan Boucher in our goal was never threatened. We could have been two goals up but the game remained scoreless.

We perhaps expected the second half would be similar and we hoped a goal would come if we kept playing in a similar way.

From virtually nothing our very own Chadd Birch scored with a great well placed shot against us with Bilbrooks first effort on target. It really emphasised the need to score goals. We were then left with trying to get something from the game with the time ticking away. In doing so Bilbrook caught us again and made it 2-0 with their second attempt on goal.

A great lesson that hopefully the players will benefit from next week. We had not played badly but Bilbrook had scored their two chances we had missed ours. If we were playing a 'normal' game we would have had time to get the goals needed back to win, but here we had no time and lost.

So into our next two x 12 minute game.

We took the lead virtually from the kick off through Greg Stanford with a goal 'out of nothing' again. We scored again a couple of minutes later through Josh Pitt and and another goal from Josh put us 3-0 up in the first five minutes - what a difference - we had not missed a chance.

When you score early on in these games it makes life so much easier because it easier to hold onto a lead than it is to try to get an equaliser, with the pressure of having the time rushing away.

When we didnt have to 'chase the game' we could play football more comfortably, we didnt have to rush and we scored two more goals.

Yves Fuala scored two extraordinary goals. The first from an impossible angle he curled a shot into the far corner.
Yves' second goal was a goal of real quality from the excellent driven cross from Josh Pitt he rose to head home an unstoppable header to round off a 5-0 scoreline.

The penalty competition was also useful to help identify our best penalty takers.

The penalty shoot out is a major feature of the Eurofoot Tournament and it draws big crowds to the specially designated penalty areas. We need our most confident 5 penalty takers to step forward when it matters in France.