Harriers lose the chance to go top

The Harriers must have been kicking themselves after this poorly executed defeat to Barrow.  When the days results came through at five o'clock we saw that we could have gone joint top with Crawley following their defeat at Burton.  With Mansfield, Rushden, Ebbsfleet, Salisbury losing and Cambridge drawing at York it would have been easy to pull away from the chasing pack a bit.

As it was we lost our unbeaten home record and that to a team that had come to Aggborough with the intention of defending for a point but ended up taking all three back to the middle of nowhere.

We went with an unchanged line-up once again and kicked the game off in decidedly wintery conditions that seemed alien to us but probably made the visiting Barrow fans think how pleasant it was.  We also started off by going close to opening the scoring in the first few seconds of the game.

Justin Richards had done well to beat a couple of Barrow defenders to the ball then beat the same defenders again to put over a short cross for Brian Smikle but the ball fell slightly behind him and his hooked shot went narrowly over the bar.

For the following few minutes the Harriers continued to look good with some neat passing but then disaster struck when Barrow were awarded a free kick well outside the area after Luke Jones fouled Lee Hunt.  Mark Boyd took it and from fully thirty yards it went through our weak wall and then bounced and went over Adam Bartletts dive.

Adam made up for his error straight away after when Barrow threatened to score again through Ashley Winn but managed to push his shot over the bar for a corner.

Once we had got over the goal we started to put some pressure on the visitors through some good play from Martin Brittain but Barrow got wise to him and started to mark him slightly too zealously.  That went over the top when Carlos Logan clattered him two footedly on the halfway line and got away with just a yellow card.

To put the icing on it soon after Britt was himself booked after kicking the ball on when the ref had blown for a throw in to Barrow.  The demon winger obviously hadn't realised that the ball had gone out and was going to get into position to make a killer cross.

Minutes later the ref targeted him again when Logan tried to get past him but stumbled while doing so.  Britt had his arms outstretched as Logan went tumbling past him and the ref, thinking that Britt had fouled him - he hadn't - called over Mark Creighton to tell him that the next time Brittain 'committed a foul' he'd be off.

With Brittain now walking on eggshells all the decent crosses to Barnes-Homer and Richards had more or less dried up.  The visitors seemed to sense that they were in with a chance and changed from a defensive formation to using two strikers up front.

We were also giving away too much possession and Hunt capitalised on that with a header over the bar following a good cross from Logan.

With time running down for half time we had our best spell in ages when we won four corners in a row but failed to convert any of them and the team went into the break looking beaten already.