Oxford United’s under 18s went to the top of the league on Saturday when a Ryan Crooks goal earned them a 1-0 win at Yeovil Town.
The U’s leapfrogged the Glovers to top the EFL Youth Alliance South West Division and coach Leon Blackmore-Such told us
“It was another very good performance. For some reason we always seem to struggle at Yeovil and we talked about preparing properly for the game and playing the way we have done in recent games despite difficult weather conditions.
“It was a good first half hour, pretty even, but we had a couple of chances before we took the lead when Michael Elechi got forward from left back and got the ball across and when the keeper spilled his shot Ryan Crooks tapped it home.
“Ryan is top scorer now for us. We talked in the summer about influencing the game more and he has responded really well. We went in at half time a goal up and it had felt fairly comfortable. We knew the wind would affect how we wanted to play a little bit but we still looked to play out and play our football.There were three or four key moments where we had two-on-one situations going forward but we also had to defend pretty well and at times it felt like we were under pressure but I think that might have been because it was top of the table and it felt worse than it actually was! Yeovil didn’t really create too many chances and our lads grafted really hard; when you are away from home against the leaders you do have to fight for everything so it was great experience.
“We are top now and have a couple of games in hand after seven straight wins, but now we are going to have to work even harder because we are there to be shot at and everyone is going to want to beat us. We play Newport at home on Tuesday and then Swindon at the weekend so that will be two good tests for us.”
United
Harris, Lofthouse, Niblett, Milton, Jones, Elechi (Sampford), McCreadie, Cowan (Edwards), Crooks (Chambers-Parillon), Spasov, James