Report by Julian Tyley
Whitley Bay manager Jay Bates had no complaints about the result of Tuesday night’s game against league leaders Redcar Athletic. “They’re a good team and you can see why they’re top of the league and why they should be going for promotion. The players they’ve brought in that have stepped down a couple of levels, they’re very comfortable on the ball and move it about well. I think the result was fair, maybe the final score flattered us a little bit but at the same time we worked hard. We were tireless to the 90th minute and limited their chances.”
He admitted that the absence of three strikers was proving a problem but revealed that two of them should be returning for the game at the weekend. “We are depleted again. We missed Alfa, he brings a physical presence up top and we missed Macca (Mackenzie Sharpe) who we brought in to score the goals and he’s got a injury at the minute. Also were missing Lucas Lowery who scored on his debut but then let himself down and got a three game ban, which unfortunately for him with all the postponements has taken a month to clear. So we’re missing those players we brought in to get us the goals and we’re back to square one where we’re having to move players around and trying different things to create goals. But at 1-0 we were always in the game. We did create a couple of chances. Dan didn’t have too much to do but he did make a couple of good saves and we were still in the game right to the 90th minute. I thought we could have got one (goal) but unfortunately we didn’t.”
“Their movement up top is very good and they’re going to create chances but they didn’t really get many clear cut chances and opportunities. I thought the defence did really well but also the two in the middle of the park Meeshi and Jakey. In the second half they covered some mileage to press from high which was good to see.
“At this time of year the pitches are heavy but you’ve got to cope with it. You could see the way they zipped the ball about and in the second half we played some good football until the final third. First half was all them, second half I thought we matched them.”
All teams at Northern League level have faced postponements in recent weeks due to the weather and this was only Whitley’s second game of the year following a successful end to 2024. Training on all weather facilities has not been straightforward either as Jay explained. “For training, you book 4G pitches but it’s too icy so you’re relying on a lot of running, so it’s been a lot of stop, start. I’m not making excuses but it’s hard when you’re not on the ground playing football; it’s hard to get that rhythm again. Look at December we didn’t lose a game in December then we’ve come back and had a sloppy game against Boldon, and to be fair I think there were some positives from that game, I thought we did play some good football in the second half there but not in the final third.”
Looking ahead he added “The next week or so we’ve got three of the bottom five but in between them we’ve got Shildon, so it’ll be a good test to see how much we’ve improved from the game against Boldon to the Shildon game.”
