⚽️ Cornwall Football: Millbrook reach first Senior Cup final since 1999
Exclusive reaction from Millbrook's Cornwall Senior Cup semi-final win over Wendron United on Tuesday. Plus, Newquay chief Craig Ainslie speaks out after the failed SWPL/Western League merger...
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⬇️ Inside today’s newsletter ⬇️
🎉 Millbrook see off Wendron to clinch place in final
🔴 ‘It’s nice to be back at the top table’ — Millbrook chief
🟣 ‘Quality let us down’, admits Wendron manager O’Neill
❌ Newquay AFC boss: Clubs feel ‘short changed’ after failed merger
⚽ Midweek round-up: St Blazey climb to SWPL summit
👀 What’s on this weekend
🎉 Millbrook see off Wendron to clinch place in final
📸 View Colin Bradbury’s full photo gallery from the game here
Wendron United 0, Millbrook 2
By Matt Friday at Burngullow Park
Millbrook will face Helston Athletic in their first Cornwall Senior Cup final since 1999 after the east Cornwall outfit ran out 2-0 winners over Wendron United in this week’s second semi-final.
Goals in either half from Jake Foster and Kieran O’Melia did the job for Mackenzie Brown’s side as they overcame Michael O’Neill’s men at Sticker AFC’s Burngullow Park to set up a mouthwatering all-Western League finale against Matt Cusack’s Blues on Easter Monday, which will be held at St Blazey’s Blaise Park.
South West Peninsula League high-flyers Wendron were first to threaten when Ryan Reeve volleyed wide from Josh Wood’s cross after eight minutes before ‘Dron defender Reece Carroll pulled off an important goal-saving block to deny Josh Johnson at the other end soon after.
The east Cornwall club got their noses in front with their next meaningful attack in the 17th minute when a low cross through the area found its way to Foster, who guided the ball past Wendron custodian Ethan Fearn and into the bottom corner from just inside the box.
O’Neill’s men had the better of the opportunities in the remainder of the first half but were unable to take one, with Jack Stocker firing wide from distance after pouncing on Brook gloveman Jake Mead-Crebbin’s loose pass before the latter made amends with an important flying save to deny Carroll’s fierce curling effort.
Johnson and Wendron substitute Cam Quirke traded chances shortly after the turnaround before the west Cornwall outfit had perhaps their best opportunity of the match in the 68th minute, with 24-goal man Charlie Young controlling Joe Souch’s cross ten yards from goal and firing it inches wide of the bottom corner.
That miss proved crucial as Millbrook got the all-important second goal ten minutes later. Wendron’s need to chase an equaliser left them open to a counter, with Caleb Summerfield delivering an inch-perfect cross from the right flank for O’Melia at the back post. The winger’s first effort was well saved by Fearn, but he was provided the simplest of finishes from the rebound.
Wendron pushed forward in the dying embers with Quirke’s dangerous cross to Young being snuffed out before substitute Joe Chapman fired narrowly over the crossbar, but their efforts were in vain as Millbrook held on to book their place in the Senior Cup final for only the third time.
📋 Wendron: Fearn, Souch, Carroll, Buckley (Chapman 87), May, S Young (Quirke 60), Reeve (Cleverly 75), Potts, C Young, Stocker, Wood. Subs (unused): Stone, Rundle.
📋 Millbrook: Mead-Crebbin, Summerfield, Murray (Cox 68), Richards, Wood, Greening, Goodman, O’Melia (Knight 84), Johnson, Foster (Toulson 75), Goulty. Subs (unused): Love-Holmes, Youlden.
🔴 ‘It’s nice to be back at the top table’ — Millbrook chief
By Matt Friday at Burngullow Park
Millbrook boss Mackenzie Brown hailed the club’s return to the ‘top table’ of Cornish football following his side’s 2-0 victory over Wendron United in Tuesday night’s Cornwall Senior Cup semi-final.
The east Cornwall side were on the verge of going out of existence only six years ago, but goals from Jake Foster and Kieran O’Melia at Burngullow Park secured the club’s return to Cornish football’s showpiece match for the first time since 1999.
It hasn’t been a natural progression through the rounds for Millbrook, who were briefly eliminated from the cup a couple of months ago. Brown’s side recorded victories over Camelford and Launceston in the early rounds before Christmas before suffering a 2-1 defeat to Liskeard Athletic in the quarter-finals.
However, it later emerged that the Blues fielded an ineligible player and the tie was promptly awarded to the Jenkins Park outfit, who took full advantage of their good fortune by going on to beat Michael O’Neill’s Wendron this week to reach the final, where they will face Helston Athletic.
Next month’s tie at St Blazey’s Blaise Park will be just the third time the Brook have graced the final, following appearances in 1984 – losing, ironically, to Liskeard – and 1999, when they were beaten by Bodmin Town.
And while the target now will be to make it third time lucky and lift the cup for the first time, Brown is delighted to end a run of 24 years away from the county’s showpiece match.
“[It feels] brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” he told Cornwall Sports Media. “It’s something we’ve had our eyes on for a few years and I thought the team we had a couple of years ago came very close. Covid interrupted that and we were a team in our peak at that moment.
“This is a different cycle of players but it’s something in the last couple of years that we’ve obviously been focused on and we’ve let ourselves down in the competition in the last couple of years.
“This season we’ve got a little bit lucky, obviously with what happened in the previous round with Liskeard playing an ineligible player, but you’ve got to take these opportunities and grab them and we've done that tonight. The lads knew that they weren’t going to get a third take, they had to go out and perform and they did.”
Tuesday night’s success is the latest high-water mark on what has been a remarkable turnaround of fortunes for the southeast Cornwall side, who were on the brink of oblivion only a few short years ago.
Under pressure from mounting creditor debts in early 2017, the club launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise vital funds, with the Cornish football community and local businesses stepping up to help out when the club needed them most.
With the debt cleared, the club – then under the stewardship of former chairman Mark Pratten – began to stabilise off the pitch, with results quickly following on it.
Promotion from the old SWPL Division 1 West – secured after a 6-1 win at Wendron, incidentally – was achieved in 2018 before a landmark maiden promotion to the Western League followed in 2021, and now the Brook can add a long-awaited return to the Senior Cup final to their extraordinary tale.
“When we got knocked out in the previous round against Liskeard I said to the lads that maybe it’s just a thing that clubs like Millbrook – we’re not fashionable, we haven’t got the resources – maybe it’s just not meant to be, maybe we’re not supposed to get into competitions like that,” Brown said.
“I said to the lads before [tonight's] game that there’s a lot of things that this football club shouldn’t have achieved. We shouldn’t be playing in the FA Vase, we shouldn’t be playing in the FA Cup, we should perhaps still be playing Step 7 football in some people’s eyes because we’re a small village club, and we’ve smashed through all of those things in the last five or six years.
“The club shouldn’t even be here, [given] where it was five or six years ago – we know the state the club was in. It shouldn’t be here, but this club fights, the players in that changing room fight and every single one of them deserves to be in a cup final.
“It is nice to be back at the top table and competing in these big games because the players really deserve it. The loyalty that they’ve shown: they play for absolutely nothing, they play for the right reasons and that should be rewarded and hopefully we can take it one step further.”
The east Cornwall side’s latest achievement is made all the more impressive given the sizeable overhaul that was required before the start of the season, with Brown and his coaching staff having to recruit the best part of a new squad.
A promising debut campaign in the Western League last term — in which Brown’s side enjoyed a solid 12th-place finish — attracted the attentions of their colleagues, with 23-goal top-scorer Rikki Shepherd and influential midfielder Tom Payne swapping Jenkins Park for divisional rivals and soon-to-be Senior Cup final opponents Helston Athletic.
A handful of other departures left Brown with a lot of work to do in the summer, with the Jenkins Park chief admitting to Cornwall Sports Media in July that his team had ‘more new faces than old faces’ going into the 2022/23 campaign.
The recruitment focused on unearthing some promising young talent, but with those combining with a handful of experienced heads, his brand-new squad has come together rather nicely and is now on the verge of achieving something very special indeed.
“It’s been a fabulous season,” Brown said. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s been downs and there’s been ups, but half of that team are 17-18 years old. It’s absolutely incredible and I think people forget that.
“Five of these boys are off to London tomorrow [Wednesday] to play [Crystal] Palace in a youth league. These are young kids and they’ve got a really bright future in the game and they’ve been magnificent for us.
“The boys that have been with me for a number of years now have guided them through it, and in the last three or four weeks we’ve just started to work things out a little bit. We’ve learnt from everything that’s happened this season and learnt from the setbacks and now hopefully we can finish on a high.”
📸 View Colin Bradbury’s full photo gallery from the game here
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🟣 ‘Quality let us down’, admits Wendron manager O’Neill
By Matt Friday at Burngullow Park
Boss Michael O’Neill expressed his frustration with his side’s performance in the wake of Wendron United’s Cornwall Senior Cup semi-final defeat to Millbrook on Tuesday night.
The South West Peninsula League high-flyers struggled to impose themselves on their higher-division opponents, whose victory ultimately came from being able to take their chances when the west Cornwall side could not.
Wendron, who lost 1-0 to Falmouth Town in their first-ever Senior Cup final in 2022, enjoyed their fair share of possession but struggled to turn that into shots on goal, with their passing in the final third often letting them down — although this wasn’t helped by the swirling wind at Burngullow Park.
While the overriding feeling immediately after the tie was one of disappointment at failing to reach back-to-back finals, O’Neill was also keen to acknowledge his team’s effort levels throughout.
“I’m really disappointed,” O'Neill told Cornwall Sports Media after the game. “We created some good chances and ultimately we just repeatedly let ourselves down with that final bit of quality.
“Sometimes [it was] our first touch [or] our choice of pass and then the execution of some of the balls was really frustrating. We worked really hard to win possession back and get into good positions, but we sometimes just make it really easy to give that possession away.
“We had the possession and we had the territory, but that was for nothing and they've scored an early goal in the first half, deservedly so when they were on top in that first part, and then they’ve caught us on a counter attack which Ethan [Fearn] had made a great first save from.
“It’s frustrating but I can’t knock the lads. It wasn’t for the lack of trying, but some days it clicks and some days it doesn’t, and today was one of those ones for us when it didn’t click.
“Fair play to Millbrook, they made the most of that situation and had a couple of good opportunities to score their goals and they took them.”
Wendron will be experiencing distinctly different emotions to the ones they had 12 months ago, when they clinched their spot in the Senior Cup final for the first time in their history with a 3-1 win over Saltash United, again at Burngullow Park.
While they were unable to repeat the feat, a second strong cup showing and another impressive SWPL campaign shows last season certainly wasn’t a flash in the pan and that Wendron very much plan to stay among the county’s elite.
“We had a good run last year and that generated a lot of belief and momentum this season,” O'Neill said. “We’ve put in some really good performances both in the cup and in the league this year.
“It’s always about improvement and my final thing before we went into the changing room was that you can never lose if you’re always learning and we learnt a lot from that game.
“The average age of the squad is still about 22 but they’ve got years and years ahead of them. It’ll be semi-final wins and defeats and winning leagues and not winning leagues that shape what they’re going to be like for the next 10-15 years.
“Everyone’s always learning and that includes myself as well. As bitter as it feels to taste defeat in a semi-final this year, it’s part of the game.”
Wendron’s season is far from over, however, with the Dron still in with an outside chance of claiming their first-ever SWPL Premier West title.
The Underlane outfit are currently second in the table, with strong favourites St Blazey adding insult to injury on Tuesday night by knocking Wendron off the top – a position O’Neill’s side had held since November 26.
Only goal difference separates the two sides, but the Green and Blacks crucially have two games in hand, meaning Wendron will likely have to win each of their three remaining games to stand a chance of being crowned champions.
One of those is against St Blazey, though, so the fat lady isn’t singing just yet – and you can be sure that O’Neill’s men will be doing all they can to take the title race right down to the wire.
“[There's] three games to go, all to play for, anything can happen,” O'Neill said. “I think we went top in the middle of November and we’ve stayed there up until tonight, so until that very final point or goal goes in that says we're not champions then we’ll hold that little belief until it’s absolutely mathematically impossible.
“We’ll go again and the lads are already waiting for the opportunity to put right [Tuesday’s defeat] and to keep that pressure on Blazey, and also Liskeard, who are coming into the frame as well with their games in hand, so it's all to play for.
“It’s very much in Blazey’s hands to see it out to the end of the season, but there’s some tough games in there — against us and against Liskeard and a couple of local derbies as well — so never write anything off and we'll do our best to play our part in who wins the league.”
❌ Newquay AFC boss: Clubs feel ‘short changed’ after failed merger
By Tom Howe
Newquay AFC boss Craig Ainslie suggests clubs have been left feeling ‘short changed’ following the collapse of the planned merger of the South West Peninsula (SWP) and Western Leagues.
The proposal was announced last summer in an attempt to give members of the SWP a sustainable route through the pyramid and placate the Bristol-based membership of the Western League, who had grown increasingly concerned about the number of extra journeys to Cornwall.
However, in February, an open letter to the FA's head of the National League System (NLS), Laurence Jones, revealed that members of the SWP side of the steering committee set up to oversee the merger had lost confidence in the committee and stepped down.
Following an emergency meeting, the Western League released a statement confirming that talks had broken down. A short time later, the FA confirmed that the initial proposal, as well as newly-presented alternatives, had officially been withdrawn.
The knock-on effect for clubs in the SWP is that the number of promotion spots promised to each of the league’s east and west divisions this season — to help populate the now-axed additional division at Step 5 — has reverted from four to just one, with several clubs, including Newquay, now facing up to the reality that promotion will no longer be an option.
“The boys need to shake off this malaise they are in because of the merger and the issues around that,” explained one affected manager, Ainslie, to Cornwall Sports Media. “In terms of motivation, I wouldn’t say that we have downed tools but you can see the lads have eyes on next season and are kind of drifting a bit.
“It is down to me and the coaching staff to make sure that that doesn’t happen and we shake ourselves down. It is not just us, I think that there are other clubs who probably feel a little short changed at this point. That is a real shame. One of the issues in the way the league structure is set up currently is that you do get a bottleneck.
“You saw last year with Falmouth, once they were running away with the league, everyone else was going through the motions. I don’t think it does a lot for the competitiveness of the division. It doesn’t do a lot for the excitement of the fans and I did feel, probably up to the point the merger was cancelled, that this was probably one of the most exciting seasons we have seen in a long time.
“Everyone felt that, with a good run of form, they could get into that top four [to earn a place at Step 5] and that there was something to be had and won which there hasn’t been. That is a big shame and the players were motivated by that at the start of the season. We were in the mix still with games in hand and I don’t blame the lads for being disappointed but they are good players. They need to give their heads a shake, dust themselves down and get back to the business of winning games.”
The current season was due to have been the last one with the current structure at Steps 5 and 6 of the NLS in the south west, with a new league comprising five divisions having been set to be in operation instead.
With that now not the case, an SWP statement later read that: “Normal promotion and relegation rules that apply nationally still exist for the end of this season but it is regretted that the merger will now not happen. The FA will now consult clubs in both leagues for future direction.”
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⚽ Midweek round-up: St Blazey climb to SWPL summit
Saltash United extended their advantage at the top of the Western League Premier Division to five points following a comprehensive 5-2 victory over Barnstaple Town on Tuesday night — despite finding themselves 2-0 down after 23 minutes.
A full-blooded game ended ten-versus-nine after Saltash had a man sent off and Barnstaple had two dismissed following an incident late on, but a 23rd win of the campaign for the Ashes puts the pressure back on Mousehole, who now have three games in hand on the leaders.
Saltash United 5-2 Barnstaple Town
Two goals from each of Adam Carter and Mike Smith plus another from Harrison Davis completed an excellent comeback for the Ashes, who had fallen 2-0 down early on through a Stuart Bowker brace. An incident late on saw Ashes man Carlo Garside receive his marching orders, while Callum Laird and Matt Andrew were dismissed for the visitors.Welton Rovers 1-2 Helston Athletic
Helston closed the gap on fifth-placed Barnstaple to five points following a narrow victory in Somerset. Sam Carter gave the Blues the lead just after the hour before the hosts levelled with ten minutes to go, only for Tom Payne to snatch all three points late on.
We have new leaders in the South West Peninsula League Premier West for the first time since late November after St Blazey climbed to the summit on Tuesday night with a 3-0 win at St Dennis.
The victory sees Blazey move above former leaders Wendron United by virtue of their slightly superior goal difference, although they do also have two games in hand on Michael O’Neill’s men.
Launceston 1-1 St Austell
Josh Harris rescued a draw for the Clarets in a game that saw both sides reduced to ten men. Kieron Bishop had put Town in front before Harris’ leveller just before the break.St Dennis 0-3 St Blazey
Goals from Sam Buckley, Andy Watkins and Jed Smale secured all three points for the Green and Blacks in their short trip to Boscawen Park, also sending them to the top of the SWPL table as a result.Wadebridge Town 4-2 Newquay
Jacob Rowe’s brace helped the third-placed Bridgers to an impressive win over Newquay, with Jacob Smale and Jack Bowyer also scoring for the home side.
👀 What’s on this weekend
⚽️Southern League Premier South: Saturday, 3pm: Truro City v Salisbury.
⚽️Western League Premier Division: Saturday, 3pm (unless stated): Cadbury Heath v Torpoint Athletic (2pm); Helston Athletic v Clevedon Town; Millbrook v Sherborne Town; Shepton Mallet v Falmouth Town; Wellington v Mousehole.
⚽️South West Peninsula League Premier West: Saturday, 3pm: Callington Town v Mullion; Dobwalls v Bude Town; Liskeard Athletic v St Blazey; Newquay v St Austell; St Dennis v Launceston.
🏆Cornwall Women’s Cup semi-finals: Sunday, 2pm: Foxhole Stars v Liskeard Athletic; Mousehole v Helston Athletic.
⚽️FA Women’s Premier League Division One South West: Sunday, 2pm: Keynsham Town v St Austell.
⚽️South West Regional Women’s Football League Western Division: Thursday, 7.30pm: Saltash United v Sticker. Sunday, 2pm: Marine Academy Plymouth v Sticker.
See you on Monday!
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