IT was one of those days when everything that could go wrong did go wrong for Winchester City.
Already without injured striker Oli Bailey and the unavailable Danny King for their FA Cup trip to Paulton Rovers, they lost winger Rob Carr to illness on the morning of the game.
And their bad luck continued in the opening 20 minutes of the all-Evo-Stik South West first qualifying round tie when City lost Adam Tomasso and Andy Jenkinson to injury.
All things considered, it wasn’t too great a setback that they trailed to Joe Chandler’s 40th-minute header from a corner at half-time.
But what really hurt is that they got no reward whatsoever for what manager Craig Davis labelled an “outstanding” second-half performance.
“It was literally wave after wave of attacks, but nothing would quite fall for us,” rued Davis in the wake of City's unlucky 1-0 defeat.
“We had shots blocked and drew lots of good saves.
“We’d brought on young Joe Hayward and 16-year-old IK Hill as subs and IK had an equaliser disallowed in the last minute.
“We piled on the pressure and pushed everybody up, including Prycey the goalkeeper, and Joe’s headed the ball back across goal for IK to nod in.
"It was hard to tell if it was offside from my angle, but it must have been tight. Everyone was in the box, so how the linesman saw it I don’t know, but it summed up our day. It was one disaster to the next.”
Tomasso’s afternoon ended prematurely when he took an elbow to the face, while Jenkinson bowed out with a hamstring problem.
“I don’t think it was an intentional elbow on Adam, but it was excessive force to say the least. He looks like he’s done ten rounds with Mike Tyson," said Davis.
“He got a cut eye and he texted me at 2.30 this morning saying he’d been to hospital for stitches. It’s pretty bad and he’s going to be out for a while.
"It was absolutely one of those days, but I couldn't ask a lot more of the lads to be honest.
“We now have to try and recover from these injuries and get back into league action on Saturday at Cirencester.”
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