Nothing to separate the sides at Oaklands Park

Having an impromptu trip to Chesterfield on Friday night, I had already planned the Saturday game weeks before, locally this time and a trip to Chichester to see them take on Corinthian, a side I had seen twice in pre-season.

My last visit to Chi was once we were allowed back to watching football after that summer which was also my first ever visit there, a tidy ground almost in the shadow of the theatre next door.

With Gaz and I having barely made it into the ground after a morning at the East Preston food festival, no sooner had we taken our places than the visitors were in the lead, Festos Kamara opened the scoring after seven minutes latching onto a loose ball inside the penalty area and slotted past Kieran Magee.

The Hoops certainly came with a game plan to stifle and frustrate the home side and break on the counter whenever they could with pace on both sides of the pitch. Chi found it hard to break down the game through the middle as the visitors made the pitch very narrow and stood their ground well, the home side’s best chances coming from getting the ball out wide and into the box but again they were finding no way through, and the visitors led by that solitary goal at the break.

The emphasis was completely on the home side in the second half to find a way through, but Corinthian kept the discipline quite content to let the Chi centre halves have the ball their side of the halfway line without putting on too much pressure.

A triple substitution from the Chi management team did seem to breathe a bit of life back into the home side, but while they beginning to create a few chances none were troubling the visitor’s keeper Dan Colmer.

Just as it seemed the visitors would be heading back to Kent with all three points, Chi conjured up an equaliser. A cross from the left-hand side from Thomas Dinsmore was misjudged by Colmer and crept under the crossbar and over the line for the home side to steal a share of the points.

Pretty effective game plan for Corinthian given the turnover of players this summer for Michael Golding and his management team and still trying to gel a team together, Chi never really got to grips with the game enough to create and win, the triple substitution helped but there was a distinct lack of encouragement it seemed from the Chi bench, no one up on their feet trying to cajole and change things around compared with the complete opposite from their visitors.

The Hoops however will feel they defended everything well enough to take the points home, but this draw gets them off the mark and you could see why they had the 4th best defensive record in the league last year.