Report by Julian Tyley
Bay manager Jay Bates felt the 0-0 draw against Blyth Town was a fair result. The point gained by the visitors was enough to take them top of the table and with both games between the sides this season ending level it showed that with greater consistency of performance Whitley could be up among the play off challengers.
“Blyth Town are a good team. We knew what to expect coming into this game. We knew what they were, they’re a handful and they score a lot of goals. I thought our defence have done really well today, they were resilient. Blyth are flying high, they’ve got a lot of confidence. They’ve just beaten West Auckland by four goals so it was a good result all in all and we’ll take it.
“We’ve got a couple of players missing. We got Macca (Mackenzie Sharpe) in to score the goals and he’s missing and Josh Stewart is missing. He’s ever reliable, he’s here each game and this is the first one he’s missed. Also we’ve got Robbie Christie suspended. These are people that have been starting a lot of games for us, so we’ve had to shuffle things about because we’ve got a couple of injuries as well. Mikey Scott’s playing again through an injury so is Luke Parkinson. I’m making no excuses, they still played out there and they played really well to be fair to them.
“Looking back on it now I think it was a fair result. They (Blyth) have had a couple of chances and half chances and same with us. Regan’s come on and could have got a couple of goals himself, he went through on the keeper one on one twice and a couple of other opportunities we’ve had, but we’ve lacked it in the final third. The pitch was a little bit heavy, but no excuses, you’ve got to adapt to the conditions. Blyth are the same, they like to play football and for two footballing teams, you’ve seen the other side of their games, where they’ve dug in to get a result. I think they’re quite happy with the 0-0 as well.”
