New Look Ely?-- The pre season starts here

Last night Ely took on Cambridge United in the first pre-season game of the season.

A lot of people had predicted a new look Ely side and many thought that Trevor Munns would more or less replace the whole team. However, this didn't really come to fruition and the team that took the pitch against Cambridge was pretty much made up of players who were at the club last season. New faces included Adam Dalby, Dave Daniels (who was at the club before) and 2 trialists, Dave Werthmann from Mildenhall and Lee James from Lackenheath. Therefore it might be concluded that the biggest differences last night were the new fence all around the pitch and the new kit, which actually had the badge on it and saw the red shorts being replaced by white shorts. Oh, another big difference was that there was a crowd of 560 instead of the usual hundred-odd, but that was mainly due to the visitors being Cambridge United.

Cambridge United more or less put out 2 different teams for each half. The first half of the game being played by what was basically the starting line up for Cambridge with a couple of trialists. The second half saw Cambridge make 8 changes. Mind you, Ely also made a lot of substitutes in the second half and as there are no squad numbers in the Eastern Counties a number of players ended up with the same numbers on. I'm sure there were 3 number 12s at one point. No wonder the local journalists behind me were getting headaches, although to be honest if they spent more time watching the game in front of their eyes than discussing Chelsea they might have a better chance of putting together a match report rather than focussing on the fact that Daryl McMahon, who hasn't been given a new contract at Cambridge United, was playing.

Not surprisingly Cambridge won the game, as they are 4 steps above Ely and it was definitely a friendly match, although in the first half judging by a couple of the challenges from Chadwick and Mason on Us players it looked anything but. Mason was lucky not to get booked and I suspect he would have been in a competetive match. Ironically a trialist for Cambridge called Robbins put the visitors ahead on the half hour mark with what I have to say was a typical goal for Ely to concede: a defensive error followed up by the ball being put in between Pacey's legs.

Ely tried to respond but I don't remember thinking that in any point of the game they really looked like scoring and on 41 minutes another trialist, Amory made the score 2-0.

As I said earlier there were alot of changes made at half time by Cambridge and a lot made during the half by Ely, so in some ways it was difficult for either team to find the shape they would have liked to. Any ideas of flowing football in the second half were also put to pay by what can only be described as a monsoon taking place during most of the game. It's funny how the slightest mention of the words football and the Ashes prompts the sky to open up isn't it? Anyway, it perhaps aided Ely and stopped a rout, as you have to remember that Ely went down 1-0 to Cambridge's reserves / youth team AKA CRC twice last season, so a mixture of these kids and seasoned pros would have expected to have inflicted real pain on the Robins. The weather made sure they didn't, although Holroyd made it 3-0 in the 83rd to make sure of the result.

In conclusion there is no conclusion. The weather, the difference in levels of the two clubs and the fact that it was a friendly and the first friendly at that makes it hard to get any knowledge of how either Ely or Cambridge will play during the season.