Men's captain McCabe reads the riot act

Men’s captain Lawrence McCabe has admonished his side’s “disappointing” performance as Newbury and Thatcham suffered a thumping 5-1 defeat against Oxford Hawks 3rd.

McCabe’s side took the lead thanks to Hallam Kelly’s third goal in two games, but conceded twice before half time and then capitulated after the break, slipping to a second defeat in three.

The result means Newbury slip to ninth in the South Central Men’s Division 1 North table ahead of the visit of league leaders Marlow 2nd on Saturday.

“It’s so disappointing because we weren’t good enough, we’ll have a team meeting before training to look at where we went wrong,” McCabe said.

“We controlled the game for the first 25 minutes but we fell apart in the second half.

“It was one of those games, it was a really bad day at the office.

“We were so disappointed to concede after playing so well that we couldn’t pick ourselves up.

“The opposition were a bit more mature than us in truth, perhaps that’s a mentality thing.

“We need to rebuild our confidence now, we won two weeks ago so there are still reasons to be positive.

“Even the first 25 minutes this week showed us that we can control a game, we just need to do it consistently throughout 70 minutes.

"I'm confident we'll bounce back, we've got a really difficult game at the weekend but we believe we can win.

"We're probably not quite where we'd like to be at this stage, but we're still optimistic and it's a long season."