The latest news from local football club Tooting & Mitcham United by Roger Butcher.

A roller coaster few weeks is the best way to describe the latest news from Tooting & Mitcham! At the beginning of December, Tooting were top of the table on the back of a record breaking 9 game winning streak. However, we lost the next game away to fellow promotion chasers, Greenwich Borough, courtesy of an injury time goal. 

Worse was to come as the news came out that Greenwich Borough had poached our top scorer, Billy Dunn, leaving a big hole for us to fill. A second injury time defeat against Walton Casuals saw us knocked off the top spot and then a 4-0 home drubbing by Hastings left us scratching our heads how we were going to get out of this slump. At 1-0 down in our Boxing Day clash at Carshalton Athletic and down to 10 men it seemed that our losing run would continue. But there is a footballing cliché that says that luck evens out over the course of a season, and in this case, it was our turn to score an injury time goal. Midfielder Chace O’Neill picked up the ball from a free kick, found a yard of space, and planted the ball into the corner of the net leaving the Tooting supporters in raptures!

Despite the point, we found ourselves dropping well behind new leaders, Dorking Wanderers. Further bad news came in the form of knee injuries to goalkeeper Matte Pierson, and left back Fabio Nunes. Both players look as if they’ll be ruled out for the remainder of the season, adding themselves to a lengthening list of long term injuries that we have suffered this season. The manager moved swiftly to bring in some new players to make sure that our season wasn’t derailed completely. Kyle Merson, who was with us in pre-season, was brought back to replace Pierson in goal, and we also signed attacking midfielder Sandy Cunningham, and striker Jack Mazzone.

These changes have paid immediate dividends as we have put together another winning run of 4 games, scoring 14 goals in the process. Both of the newcomers have scored goals and Kyle Merson has kept a clean sheet. The pick of these victories has to be the 4-0 away win at promotion hopefuls, Hythe Town.  Sandy Cunningham opened the scoring, backed up by Danny Bassett’s first hat trick for the club. It was a stunning win at a ground where we have had very little success in recent seasons.

This winning run, coupled with some unexpected dropped points by Dorking Wanderers, meant that we have reclaimed top spot again, in what looks like it will be a very tight end to the season. The players and the management have shown great character to emerge from the December slump, to get back to the attacking success that worked so well for us earlier in the season.

We have also progressed in the two County Cups that we enter – The London Senior Cup and The Surrey Senior Cup. We beat Erith & Belvedere and Carshalton Athletic respectively and are in the 3rd round of both competitions. Although these may be considered minor competitions by some, its always great to win silverware, and hopefully we will progress further in both cups.

But the promotion challenge takes top billing at the moment, and we have a big, big clash coming up on Saturday. We host 3rd place Greenwich Borough, who are hanging on to our coat tails and we’re very keen to shake them off. Obviously they are a good side and as I mentioned earlier, they beat us in the return fixture a few weeks ago. So this is the first of a series of critical games for us over the coming weeks. 

Why not come along and add your support, and hopefully help to push is over the line.

Come along – the 280 stops right outside!

Upcoming home fixtures:

V Faversham Town – Sat 28th January, KO 3pm

V Knaphill (Cup) – Tue 31st January, KO 7:45pm

V Sittingbourne – Sat 11th February, KO 3pm

Keep up to date with the goings on at Unofficial Website Or Official Facebook Page