Friday Night Football to return to the Exacta!

Superb goal by Joe Ormrod

What a week it's been, sadly I missed the FC United match due to being away in London all weekend for Mrs B's birthday weekend, but kept in touch via the Twitter feed, and was delighted to see that the lads kept up the 100% pre season record, with a 'come from behind' win - and even better to see that Joe Ormrod scored a cracker on his debut after making the step up from Chester FC Youth last week.

The weekend also saw our pre-season plans being disrupted, thanks to a couple of teams. First of all after setting up a match against Fleetwood on July 23rd - they then ended up going and setting up a match of their own on July 22nd, which made it plainly obvious that they were then only going to send their young kids, something that we were not prepared to see as a fixture, and so the fixture was pulled.

Are you Phil Thompson in disguise?

All through July there has been much discussion over the Stockport friendly, and it's fair to say that we were 'monitoring their situation' very closely indeed - we all know who was 'rumoured' to be linked to their club, but you can go changing fixtures around without knowing full facts, and Didi Hamann confirmed that despite cancelling other away friendlies, he wanted the Chester match to go ahead.

That match would have been discussed further in time, but then Stockport then advised us that they were pulling out of the game, quite insulting really knowing that it didn't leave much time to sort out another game, bear in mind that 99% of teams already have a friendly set up for that date - shame we didn't book Accrington Stanley in instead hey!

People will ask why we need to play so many games at home, it's simple, we have money to raise in our pre-season games as part of our budget, so to have pre-season messed around the way it has been is rather annoying not just to us, but to Neil Young who will have been gearing his team up for these friendlies.

It's not been easy to get friendlies booked in against the 'big' teams, with many of them sorting out their schedules well in advance, and despite us requesting 'glamour' friendlies against some big clubs, it just hasn't happened for one reason or another this year, although a large part of that is the fact that virtually every Premier League club has left the UK for a tour elsewhere, and the further they travel the longer they need to prepare & recover, hence the lack of dates available, but again it's something we'll look at for next year, and I'm confident that we'll have a friendly or two against Premier League opposition next season.

We have of course a game now against Airbus on Friday night, and one to look forward to, it will certainly be one for Ash Williams to look forward to given his move from The Wingmakers last year, and another good chance for fans to see the Chester lads who are doing well this time round as well, and it showed how much the lads want this, by their performances against Tranmere & FCUM (okay, I'm basing my thoughts on FCUM from the NATV clips, but it looked like we were up for it!).

Looking forward to getting back to it all on Friday night, and hopefully a third win in a row for the Blues!