Terrible opening 45 minutes tonight, by the time Tranmere had found the net for the third time (dissallowed) the BEST I was hoping for was to go on to lose by 2 goals.

But two well timed subs seemed to do the trick, with Tranmere looking increasingly rocky as the game wore on - although without the enforced earlier sub of Schofield, I'm not convinced Abbott and Beckett would have had the impact they did.

The movement of Abbott caused them all sorts of trouble, meaning Young and GTF were able to really stretch the play and attack Tranmere where they'd been shackled in the first half, Town were awesome in the opening 10 minutes leading up to Booths goal.

And then, when Tranmere were starting to even things up again and it looked like 2-1 might be our lot, on comes Beckett to give them something else to think about, and to me there only looked like one team likely to get the third after that.

First half - Glennons kicking was atrocious, Adams was a liability, Booth was winning about 0 in 10 of aerial balls at the front, Mirf had a similar success rate at the back and the ball just wasn't being moved around at all.

Second half - Glennons kicking remained poor until the last 15 mins or so, Adams game gradually picked up, but Young, GTF, Abbott & Beckett stole the show, abley backed up by Collins, taking corners which we actually got goal scoring chances from rather than ending up with the ball near our penalty area as per the Hudson corners.

It seemed in the first half that Adams and Holdsworth were backing off a bit much, especially as Tom Clarke was always coming across to cover so they generally could commit to the tackle.

Booth had quite a good game despite his lack of aerial influence.

But for me, we won it by effort. There was a lack of effort in the first half, and there was an obviously heightened level of committment in the second half. It made the difference.

By my reckoning, we win on Saturday (probably with the same team that finished tonight, with *perhaps* Brandon or Schofield starting in place of Young), as do Tranmere, and then we have the carrot of potentially going above Bradford the week after to make it the kind of 'loaded' game that we seem to perform in.

I enjoyed the game tonight. And we were sitting at the right end for the goals!

By Nigel Taylor from the HTFC mailing list.