Pre-season friendly
By Robert Nisbet

The Bluebirds’ home game with West End on Tuesday saw them round off their programme of matches against Welsh League opposition with a one-nil win.

For the whole of the first half it looked as if the margin could have been far greater as the Blues set going one flowing move after another, drawing more spontaneous applause from the stand than we’ve heard for a very long time.

Steffan Williams and Neil Thomas both went close early on, and Thommo nearly pulled off a spectacular opener in the 30th minute when he saw the keeper off his line and cracked in a 50-yarder which the keeper turned on to the bar with some difficulty. Five minutes later Lee Jarman hammered home his header from Chris O’Sullivan’s corner and the Blues were on their way.

Once the game went into its substitution phase in the second half some of the early steam went out of it. But by that time we had seen many performances which augured extremely well for the season. Mark Dodds and Jarman looked very secure in the centre of defence. O’Sullivan seemed to relish his role in central midfield. We saw an extremely polished performance by Kristian Griffiths at left back, a fine second half display by Jack Jones and a welcome return for Haydn Ralph.

County: Lee Idzi; Kyle Graves, Kristian Griffiths, Lee Jarman, Mark Dodds, Terry Evans, Chris O’Sullivan, Danny Thomas, Neil Thomas, Steffan Williams, Lee Hudgell.
Subs: Jamie Bradford, Jack Jones, Haydn Ralph, Vincent Atueyi, Dorian Davies.