Coventry Sphinx 2-1 AFC Rushden & Diamonds
Stuart Guest
It was a long time coming but Coventry Sphinx’s first win as a Step Four football club was worth the wait.
Joint managers John Woodward and Shaun Thomas led their side out for this Pitching In Northern Premier League Midlands fixture against AFC Rushden & Diamonds knowing that the opposition were also winless despite dropping into the division Sphinx were promoted into.
The home team were made to work for these three points. They were a goal down at half time and were reduced to ten men early in the second, shortly after equalising and just as they’d seized the initiative in the match. To emerge from that situation with a win was impressive to say the least.
Sphinx had a new signing in their starting line-up. Finlay Shorrock, signed from Loughborough Dynamo, came in at left back. There were home debuts for Will Edjenguele at centre back and Jac Redhead as part of a front three.
Louis Guest and Callum Whiteside completed the back four in front of goalkeeper Keelan Fallows, Jack Downes and Luke Downes played in midfield with captain Callum Woodward, and Jordan Hayward returned from injury to operate as Redhead’s opposite number off striker Matty Shipman.
Sphinx made a promising start but the Diamonds won a succession of corners inside the first ten minutes that consistently carried a whiff of danger.
The first slice of bad luck to befall the home team came as early as the twelfth minute when Hayward succumbed to another injury, this time sustained in the opposition penalty area as he fought to make an attacking impact from his more advanced position. Dylan Parker replaced him and Sphinx had to shuffle the pack.
The visitors edged the early possession but there were chances at both ends in what looked in the opening stages like a game between two struggling teams. Fallows made a comfortable save shortly after Hayward’s withdrawal but it was Sphinx that pushed on for the next few minutes.
Jack Downes and Parker both had efforts blocked from the same scramble after a Sphinx free kick, and good play by Shipman led to another blocked shot from Redhead. The resulting Woodward corner was won by Edjenguele, whose header was also snuffed out before it found the gloves of Diamonds goalkeeper George Rose.
The defender was well positioned to thwart the visitors at the other end but Rushden won a corner and their set piece pressure inevitably got them in front. The delivery from their right was won in the air and Will Jones flicked a volley in off the crossbar to put the away team ahead in the 22nd minute.
Thomas and Woodward’s men responded well. Parker got in behind in the 26th minute at the end of a nice Sphinx move but could only power his shot just over from a tight angle before the Diamonds built some momentum in search of a second goal.
After another sequence of corners and a couple of vital pieces of fielding by Fallows from crosses that might have been inadvertently goalbound, a better chance went begging in the 34th minute. The block was needed but the finish was untidy. The visitors would come to rue it.
Skipper Woodward sent an effort over the top from outside the penalty area but his team were living dangerously at the back. Rushden & Diamonds looked potent on the break for a spell and Woodward had to clear off the line shortly after Will Glennon’s curling shot from 20 yards had sailed just over the Sphinx crossbar.
A deficit at half time was the last thing Sphinx needed but in the first few fixtures of the season they made a virtue of staying in the game. It didn’t always pay off but it certainly paid off in the second half against Rushden.
They were on the front foot right from the start of the half. Woodward lifted a free kick into the box and Guest’s glancing header drifted harmlessly wide as early as the 46th minute, and it wasn’t long before the home team found their crucial equaliser.
Woodward won the ball in the middle of the park and guided it through for Shipman. The striker had the run on his marker and held him off before sending an unerring finish low past Rose and into the bottom corner.
Sphinx were in the ascendancy after scoring but it was short-lived. Four minutes after the goal Luke Downes pounced on a loose ball in midfield and tried to knock it past Rushden’s Ben Garwood and into green space with support arriving.
Garwood got there after Downes and cleaned him out but the referee overruled his assistant on the near side and gave the foul the other way, adding the midfielder’s second yellow card into the bargain to leave Sphinx with a tricky puzzle to solve over the next forty minutes.
The dismissal of Downes inevitably changed the shape of the game and the Diamonds did everything they could to capitalise. Fallows had a shot covered three minutes after the red card and held on after saving from a header ten minutes later. In between, Parker’s shot appeared to have been blocked with the use of a hand in the away team’s box.
With Rushden & Diamonds having all of the ball in the middle of the second half and Sphinx eager to avoid a damaging defeat, defender James Bryson came off the bench to make his first appearance of the season after injury. Sphinx soon had yet another injury to contend with when Redhead had to be replaced by Max Johnson with quarter of an hour remaining.
Yet more Diamonds corners came and went before the game’s dramatic conclusion. Teed up by Shipman’s header after an 90th-minute throw-in from the Sphinx right, Parker produced a clever, instinctive finish to hook the ball beyond Rose from eight yards out and into the net.
The ecstatic celebrations would have counted for nothing had the ten men of Sphinx not then held on. Parker himself made two vital, powerful runs on the right to protect the lead he’d earned in the dying minutes of regulation time. Rushden & Diamonds, understandably deflated, didn’t have an answer.
These three points were important for Sphinx. A first win of the season comes with some relief, and the team can now look to recapture some of the form that might have yielded more than it did in the first few weeks of the season.
It must be just the start. With a two-week break to focus on the next fixture away at Rugby Town, Sphinx have time to regroup and consider the good, the bad and the ugly of the season so far. There’s been all three.
Sphinx still have work to do to establish themselves in the new season but they overcame a big psychological hurdle by adding to the win column at last.
Sphinx team
Fallows, Whiteside (Bryson), Shorrock, L. Downes, Guest, Edjenguele, Hayward (Parker), Woodward, Shipman, Redhead (Johnson), J. Downes. Unused subs: Ellis, Peplinski