Harriers goal drought continues

We slumped to another defeat down at Torquay's Plainmoor stadium today when a goal in first half injury time from Mark Ellis gave the Gulls all three points.  The win keeps them in second place but still six points behind leaders Aldershot who also won today at Farsley.

For us we have failed to win a game since we too beat Farsley three weeks ago and now with two less strikers in the pack it looks to be doubtful if we'll ever win a game again.

Mark Yates discarded the idea that our new players that looked quite promising against Northwich last week would be able to build on that game by relegating two of them, Darryl Knights and Matt Bailey, to the bench as we went with a 4-5-1 formation to try and stifle the Torquay attack.  In their place came Gavin Hurren and Brian Smikle somewhat ironically after 99% of the fans believed that they were the two main weak links in the side and should have gone to Oxford instead of Justin Richards and Michael Blackwood.

The game was never going to be a classic and so it turned out.  The first half was mainly devoid of any real attacking football and we failed to get a single shot on target throughout the first forty five minutes.

United weren't doing much better either.  A shot from Roscoe D'Sane was blocked by Mark Creighton, Kian Mohamed saw a shot go well wide of Chris MacKenzies goal and a header from Chris Hargreaves went over the bar in the 38th minute.

In the 40th minute Gavin Hurren picked up a yellow card after tripping up Mohamed as he made his way towards goal and then Jeff Kenna gave out the same treatment to Chris Zebroski as he chased a long ball but luckily for us Sir Jeff got away with it.

Our first real attempt at scoring came soon after when Dean Bennett sent a fierce effort flying across the face of the goal but there was no one near to get a touch on it.  Our second chance came straight after when Alex Jeannin slipped a pass through to Hurren just outside the box but he fired over the bar when he should really have done better.

With the teams looking certain to go into the break all square Torquay broke the Harriers fans hearts with a goal deep in stoppage time.  The professional actor, Tim Sills, took a dive in the penalty area in a transparent attempt to gain a penalty and in the confusion the ball went out for a corner.  From the corner D'Sane's shot was blocked by Smikle but fell at the feet of Mark Ellis who bundled it home from close range.