AFC Totton
VENUE:
Snows Stadium, Salisbury Road, Totton, Southampton SO40 2RW
Saturday 24 August 2024 | Kick-Off at 3:00pm
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HAVING WON THEIR FIRST THREE matches of the 2024/25 season, AFC Totton will entertain the only team that took all six points off them last season when Hungerford Town visit the Snows Stadium on Saturday afternoon (24 August 2024).
Jimmy Ball’s men have begun the new campaign in fine form, overcoming Walton & Hersham on the opening day despite playing more than half the match with 10 men, beating Sholing on their own ground in a league match for the first time in 14 years, and making it three wins from three with a battling one-goal victory at Poole Town last weekend.
At a little over 270 minutes into the new season – allowing for a few minutes of stoppage time, here-and-there – The Stags are the only side in the 22-team Southern League Premier Division South yet to concede a goal.
The Crusaders began their own 2024/25 with a surprise 1-4 defeat in Surrey, against the reigning Isthmian League South Central Division Champions Chertsey Town. Jack Mazzone, who scored the second goal in Totton’s 0-2 defeat at Horsham in the Third Round of last season’s Isuzu FA Trophy, put an early dent in Hungerford’s Goals Against column in the first minute of their encounter at Alwyns Lane, and The Curfews had shovelled four into the Berkshire-based club’s net before Elis Watts pulled on back deep into stoppage time.
Hungerford bounced back in impressive style, though, with a convincing 5-2 victory over last season’s Play-Off contenders Gosport Borough on Tuesday 13 August. Another familiar face was on-target for The Crusaders in the 82nd minute, when winger Zidan Akers – who spent several months with AFC Totton earlier this year – stepped off the bench to score his new team’s fifth goal of the game.
Elis Watts scored Hungerford’s second goal against Gosport that night, and he kept up his 100% strike rate with the only goal of Taunton Town’s visit to Bulpit Lane last weekend, leaving manager Danny Robinson’s team in ninth place ahead of their trip to the South Coast – just one place lower than where they finished the 2023/24 campaign.
On their previous visit to the Snows Stadium last November, that man Watts scored what proved to be the winning goal nine minutes into the second half, after Cheltenham Town-loanee Adulai Sambú had given The Crusaders the lead three minutes before the interval. A diving header from Scott Rendell halved The Stags’ deficit, but the home side were unable to find an equaliser in the remaining 12 minutes.
Conor McDonagh hit the only goal midway through the first half of the return match at the Town Ground in mid-April. Goalkeeper Ryan Clarke produced an impressive save to deny Rendell an equaliser shortly before half-time, with a ferociously struck effort from the edge of the Hungerford penalty area.
Speaking after the win at Poole Town last weekend, AFC Totton boss Jimmy Ball told AFC Totton TV:
“Hungerford were the only side that beat us twice last season. That’s a bit of a splinter that we’d like to pull out. But it’s not me pulling it out – it’s the players who have got to turn up and perform, and do their jobs, which they did against Poole by working hard and taking all three points.”
By Ben Rochey-Adams
