22/11/2023
By Chris Gibbs
Avro claim the points as home woes continue
Newcastle Town 0
Avro 1, Bebeto (30)
Despite having most of the ball and for spells of the game, particularly in the first half, looking threatening, the hoodoo that is our home form couldn’t be broken as we went down to a narrow defeat against Avro.
Our visitors from Oldham had a straightforward plan – sit deep, let us have as much of the ball as we wanted and then simply wait for an opportunity. They did just that and it worked a treat – Gomes Bebeto scoring the only goal of the game after half an hour.
The result takes Avro into the play-offs while for us, well we need to come up with a way of replicating the excellent form we have shown on our travels into something more tangible at home, where we have just the one league win this season.
Knowing that the onus was on us to make the running, the gaffer Paul Moore went with two up top as Patrick Mazurkiewicz joined forces with Dan Cockerline.
However, it was our captain Tommy van Der Laan who had our best chance with a header saved at point blank range by visiting keeper Grant Shenton on the quarter hour mark. The opportunity was created after a clever back heel from Danny Edwards which found the overlapping Ollie Ritchie.
Avro could have been in front before then, Muis Bibire Bello finding space on the inside right and floating his shot over the bar with Joe Slinn in no-man’s-land.
Paul rang the changes in the second half introducing Tom Jones for his debut on the hour for Pat Mazurkiewicz. Kingsley Adu Gyamfi and Jack van Der Laan also came on to Joe Berks and Isaac Graham respectively but to no avail, we simply couldn’t a find a way through a well drilled Avro backline.
Vauxhall Motors are next up on Saturday – a team that sits 16th in the league but are only a point below us. We’ll go again and look to find the creative part of our game that just isn’t quite clicking at the moment.
Newcastle team:
Slinn, Derbyshire, Ritchie, T, Van der Laan, Jordan, Stubbs, Berks, (Adu Gyamfi 72), Graham, (J. Van der Laan 80), Cockerline, Edwards, Mazurkiewicz, (Jones, 60.)
Man of the match: Josh Jordan