Ridgeons First DivisionLong Melford roundupSince last week, there have been a lot of things happening at Long Melford. With the blessing of the club, John Taylor left the Villagers to join the Newmarket FC at the start of the week.

Ridgeons First Division

Long Melford roundup

Since last week, there have been a lot of things happening at Long Melford.

With the blessing of the club, John Taylor left the Villagers to join the Newmarket FC at the start of the week. All at Long Melford thank John for his efforts at the club and wish him all the very best.

It was not a surprise at Long Melford, as it was known that John had applied for jobs at AFC Sudbury and King's Lynn to name two, hopefully John will be able to progress further from his new position.

Where do we go from here? Well nowhere quickly. The Directors have indicated that they wish to sit and carefully review the future before dashing into the wrong decisions.

It is heartening that without advertising the position there have been expressions of interest from experienced sources, including one party submitting virtually a CV to be considered for the manager's job.

It is heartening because reading the Ridgeons website there are postings that almost write us off as a Club. Just a reminder to those who pose that sort of conjecture we may be a 'Little Village' but we are about the 7th oldest established Football Club in the land, so we have bit of a pedigree and we will get back off the floor soon!

At Walsham Jim Walker took over control from his position of Assistant Manager, and although we went down 4-1 and the home team deserved the victory we were not humiliated.

One of our youngsters, 16-year-old Carl Daw scored a fine goal, and another of our older youngsters Danny Stokes (19) had a good game and managed to put his own penalty kick wide.

We will miss Danny over the next four games as he is suspended, but the seven-day approaches from Haverhill, AFC Sudbury and Diss Town will probably be of little value so we hope that Danny will stay loyal to Melford.

The Reserve game on Saturday was a nightmare according to Manager Nick Cook with a 6-1 hammering at home to Harwich Reserves, our scorer being Danny Stokes. According to Nick the fact that very few of his team bother to train was evident, and it is the old story really of a lack of dedication. The star player was Danny Brind on his return from the badly broken leg.

Today we are at Swaffham Town and next Saturday we have a six-pointer at home against Godmanchester. When your luck is down it is really down, playing in the Reserves keeper Dean Watson was injured and could not continue in the second half. Midfielder Chris Wheeler, who was to start with us at Walsham coming from West Bergholt FC, broke his ankle playing Sunday football.

I think our luck will change shortly, perhaps with a new manager helping out on the field and bringing some match-winning players to us before the deadline. Well you have to look on the bright side!