Gloucester City vs Poole Town – Match Preview (Playoffs)
After some tense moments, especially in the second half of the season The Dolphins have qualified for the Southern League Premier South play-offs and will travel to Gloucester City who finished in third place. The match will be played at their KMM Energy Stadium on Wednesday ko 7.45pm.
In our final game of the regular season, we came close to earning all three points in the closing stages at Uxbridge but in the end, we were perhaps happy with a point.
With 42 matches played and the conclusion of the leagye season, we have finished in 4th place (P42 W21 D12 L9 75 points) and shows just how far we have come as a club in one season. The focus now is all on the play-off semi-final. In these games, form seems to mean little as it is all down to what happens on the day.
We lost both league games to The Tigers. At the KMM Energy Stadium we took an early lead but fell 3-1 behind until Henry Spalding set up a frenetic finish with his 83rd minute strike. Gloucester held on and took all three points. At Tatnam we went behind early in the first half and that’s how it stayed until Shaq Gwengwe gave us a 56th minute equaliser. Bizarrely, with the celebrations hardly died down The Tigers broke away and re-took the lead almost immediately. We pushed really hard but didn’t do enough to take a point. We will need to be at our defensive best to achieve a clean sheet as City have failed to score at home in only one league match this season, that was the surprising 2-0 defeat to Taunton Town on Easter Monday.
As we know Gloucester City have been in the play-offs before, they missed out to AFC Totton in the final last season going down 1-0 in front of a crowd of 2079 at Totton’s Snows Stadium. After this disappointment they decided to make a management change and turned to someone they know well, Daf Williams. He was with the club in the 2021/22 and 2022/23 seasons before joining EFL side Newport County as Assistant Manager.
City have three championship based loanees in their ranks currently. Defender Zack Ali is on-loan from Bristol City, until the end of the season, Jamal Mohammed is on loan from West Bromwich Albion and Coventry City have recently agreed to extend the loan of Rylie Siddall, again until the end of the season.
Leading scorer for the Tigers is journeyman Kane Simpson who joined from Taunton, but was with Merthyr last season helped them achieve promotion. He has scored 26 goals in this campaign which is 11 in front of fellow striker Joe Hanks.
Ticket arrangements for the match have been posted on the club’s website and demand for the 400 available is bound to be high. Pat and Joe have often commented this season on how valuable the away support has been and what a difference it makes. We go into the match full of confidence knowing that we have the quality to match anyone on the day.
Should we be successful, the final will be played on Monday 4th May.
Enjoy the game
Neil Wellington.