Fleet Spurs 1, Farnham Town 3

FARNHAM Town’s battling win over a dogged Fleet Spurs side last Saturday may on the face of it not seem anything out of the ordinary.

After all, Town are gunning for promotion to the top table of the Combined Counties League, chasing runaway leaders Jersey Bulls hard on the back of a seven-game unbeaten league run, while Fleet lie in the bottom half of the table after a horrible run of seven straight defeats.

But things are not always as they seem and last March Town capitulated to a 5-1 defeat on Fleet’s exposed and bumpy Kennels Lane pitch – the worst defeat Luke Turkington has suffered in his one-and-a-bit seasons in the Farnham hotseat – while Spurs were bottom of the league and Town still harboured a tiny glimmer of hope of promotion.

This time around, Town made no mistake, to not only banish the memories of that spring horror show but also to prove that they can beat the lower-ranked sides as well as the promotion candidates, something which proved to be their Achilles heel last season.

“It wasn’t the best performance, in fact it was quite a poor performance, but nevertheless it’s three points and I will happily take that, I’m really pleased with the result,” said a relieved Turkington.

“We said it was a game we weren’t looking forward to: the pitch conditions, the team itself, they are quite a physical side, quite a fast and energetic side. The pitch is fairly worn already so it’s a difficult surface to play on, the wind was swirling around, the sun is in your eyes. You just want to go in there, get the three points and get out of there, and we did that.”

In-form Town striker Charlie Oakley opened the scoring as he gleefully smashed the ball home from five yards after Mark Corbett’s initial shot was spilled by the shaky Fleet goalkeeper, but Spurs drew level three minutes before half-time after an error from the normally ever-reliable Harry Oakley, who tried to play through illness but was subbed off at half-time, gifted an equaliser via a tap in at the back post.

But Farnham, who were winning for the eighth time in ten starts to cement second spot in Division One, are made of stern stuff these days and Jack May, who is also in a rich vein of form just now, restored Farnham’s lead on 65 minutes after cleverly converting Bruce Harper’s deep free kick toward the back post.

And that man Charlie Oakley made the game safe by being alert to a crossfield ball and beating the keeper at his near post with a fierce drive four minutes from time.

“Last year we struggled there, so I think we’ve turned a corner,” said Turkington, “but we are only ten games in so we are keeping our feet firmly on the ground for now and we hope we don’t make any slip ups in the next few games.

“I was impressed with our midfielders trying to play the football that we like to play, but I was also impressed with our back line making more right decisions than wrong ones. It’s not really a pitch to play football on, so sometimes it’s necessary to just get the ball as far away from your goal as you can. We did that pretty well.

“The strikers tend to take the accolades but the midfielders and back line have done their job superbly as well, so it’s been an all-round class performance so far.”

While Farnham have done well so far against the leading lights of the division, they are now starting to show their versatility in dealing with the sides at the wrong end of the table, as highlighted by Saturday’s win on Fleet Spurs’ poor pitch and the thumping 7-0 win at Cove earlier in the campaign.

“We’re going to have to roll our sleeves up, grit our teeth and see what happens when we go full steam into January and February,” said the likeable Town boss.

“So far it’s been a carbon copy of last year and we ended up finishing fourth which would be enough to get promoted this year, but we don’t want to finish fourth, we want to finish as high as we can, and we have every reason to believe we can finish top of the league.”

*Farnham Town bowed out of the Division One Cup with a 5-2 defeat at Godalming Town on Tuesday night.