Falmouth Town manager Andrew Westgarth hailed his side’s performance as ‘outstanding’ after they strolled to a 3-0 victory over Sherborne Town on Saturday.
James Ward, Tim Nixon and Louis Jagger Cane scored in the torrential rain at Bickland Park as Town avenged their 2-1 defeat at the Dorset side seven days earlier and rubber-stamped an eighth-place finish at worst in their first Western League campaign for 40 years.
Ward opened the scoring in the 14th minute when he nodded in at the back post from Nixon’s corner, with Nixon getting on the scoresheet himself ten minutes after the turnaround when the rebound from Josh Attwood’s save from Ryan Downing’s strike fell to his feet six yards from goal, leaving the winger with a simple tap-in.
Downing could and perhaps should have made it 3-0 two minutes later when he dragged a shot wide when one-on-one with Attwood before Luke Brabyn blazed Luke Barner’s cross over the bar shortly after, but substitute Jagger Cane was on hand to make the game safe only two minutes after coming off the bench, finishing coolly after his initial effort was saved.
The impressive victory means Town have secured eighth spot and could yet finish seventh, and Westgarth, who began by offering his congratulations to newly-crowned Western League champions Mousehole, was thrilled with his side’s efforts.
“First of all, congratulations to Mousehole, it’s a fantastic achievement to win any football league,” he said. “Today shows the frustrations of a manager: we were outstanding at Bridgwater, really poor last week and today I thought we were outstanding again. I thought we dominated the game, we had chances, we looked great going forward – everyone to a man was brilliant.
“We spoke last week up at Sherborne that our ball retention was non-existent, whereas today I thought we kept the ball really well and played some nice football.
“You can be super critical, 3-0 is probably a flattery to them and where we’ve probably come up short this year is when we’ve been on top of games we haven’t killed teams off and it was a little bit like that today – for all of our chances, you can always get stung at the other end [if you don’t take them].
“But overall, I’m so pleased with the boys to get the win and the clean sheet in tough conditions. I can’t believe it’s May next week and there was talk of the game getting abandoned, it was that bad, but a great performance.”