“We haven’t made it easy for ourselves” says St Ives Town manager Jez Hall ahead of Yaxley game

HAD St Ives beaten Huntingdon Town on Saturday, they could be going to Yaxley tomorrow to secure second place – but with Spalding now one point behind the promotion-chasing Saints, it looks like the away game at Shepshed Dynamo on Saturday is going to be the decisive one.

“Instead of making it nice and easy for ourselves, we have gone and made it tough again,” said St Ives joint manager Jez Hall, who was still bitterly disappointed with Saturday’s 2-1 defeat at home to Huntingdon when he talked to The Hunts Post on Monday afternoon.

“It was such a shame because after we had beaten Holbeach [who were by then champions] we reverted to the way we played against Newport Pagnell.”

While the Saints are at Yaxley tomorrow, Spalding will be at Cogenhoe United, a team they will be expecting to beat. On Saturday, while St Ives are at Shepshed’s Butthole Lane (I kid you not), Spalding will be Peterborough Northern Star.

It’s still in St Ives’ hands, of course, two wins and the nod of approval from the FA and they should be playing Step 4 football next season. But there can be no more slip-ups – not like there were against Newport and then Huntingdon. This, as they say, is going right to the wire.

Hall and his co-manager Warren Everdell were without some key players on Saturday. Left back Jamie Alsop, one of the best in the United Counties League, still had a sore knee after running the London Marathon. Combative midfielder Jimmy Dean had been playing with cracked ribs and suffering from a dead leg – he came on from the bench but was unable to change the tide of the game. David Cobb, the experienced goalscoring winger – again, one of the best in the league at what he does – picked up a thigh injury during the game against Holbeach.

Hall is hoping that Alsop and Dean will be back tomorrow night – but has his doubts that Cobb will be fit enough.

“We need to play with a bit of zip,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a very good game on Saturday, and the conditions didn’t help us, the wind was atrocious.

“But we didn’t deal with Ben Seymour-shove for the first deal, we allowed him three attempts to get the ball across and in the end it went in with a massive deflection – and then we allowed the same player, the smallest lad on the pitch, to score with a header, and after Dom Lawless had done so well to get us the equaliser as well.”

Lawless had a great chance to make it 2-1 in the 47th minute but Hall refused to criticise his striker for missing the target. “He has scored 17 goals in 16 games,” he said. Indeed. A few more at Yaxley wouldn’t go amiss, though.