Battling Linnets draw a blank but still bag first point of the campaign

AFC Darwen 0 Burscough 0 BURSCOUGH had to fight hard for their first league point of the season at Darwen’s Anchor Ground last Saturday afternoon.

The East Lancashire side piled on plenty of late pressure, but Dave Sutton’s outfit showed their tenacity to thwart any attempts to take away the reward for an afternoon’s toil and they might even have grabbed a winner in the encounter.

The opening exchanges saw no goalkeeper seriously troubled until the 14th minute when Darwen won a penalty when Mohammed Nabeel was fouled.

However, when Mark McKay hit the Burscough crossbar with his strike from 12 yards, the away support breathed a sigh of relief.

A pattern was developing in the contest as Darwen pushed Burscough back, but the Linnets were looking dangerous themselves on the counter-attack.

Ironically, though, one Burscough attack was ended superbly by Jamie Edwards and it swiftly led to an effort by the hosts’ centre-forward Nick Hepple that went wide of the target.

Just before the interval Burscough went close to opening the scoring.

Jamie Clark, who had replaced Will Threkeld in the Linnets’ line-up, brought an excellent diving save out of Darwen goalkeeper Charlie Whittingham.

After the restart early Darwen pressure was dealt with but Burscough still produced some promising breakaways.

It began to get quite frantic in the last 10 minutes.

One threat was dealt with by Burscough goalkeeper Louis McCarthy, keeping out Hepple via a fingertip save on 82 minutes.

Shortly after, home defender Anthony Hodges saw himself in the spotlight in the space of 60 seconds.

First he hit the Burscough crossbar with a header from an Alex Ralph corner before he was shown a red card for a wild challenge moments later.

The intensity of the game subsided a bit after the dismissal and Burscough were grateful for their point, the crowd going home without seeing a goal but feeling entertained after a thrilling second half.