ARNETT Gardens Head Coach Paul “Tegat” Davis hailed the “unbelievable” performance of his team on Sunday after they played short-handed for three quarters of the game against Dunbeholden and still came away with all three points, ending the former league leaders’ unbeaten run at nine games.

Struggling with injuries for almost three weeks, Arnett Gardens dropped five points against two of the league’s cellar dwellers in their last two games, but responded on Sunday with a big performance in a 1-0 scoreline against the second-place team in the league.

“It’s a good shift. For the past two and a half weeks we have been suffering injuries so our performances for the last two games have been poor.

“Then we had Damari [Deacon] who has [two] broken ribs, so he is out for the rest of the season, so I couldn’t even push them for these two weeks. So, to see them come out here in this manner and fight, it’s unbelievable,” he said.

Davis suggested that it wasn’t an ideal situation, but was happy that his players were able to handle the challenge.

“You don’t really wanna play any game with nine or ten men, but it is what it is.”

Surprisingly, after going down to 10 players, there was no defensive change and Davis explained why that was so.

“We have players that can play dual positions so we put Steve Clarke, who is a right winger, to play the right back and he understands the system that we wanted to play.

“To me, maybe he has to play right back,” he joked.

Davis also hailed the support of the home crowd against the team that passes the ball the best in the league.

“It’s very important because you have a team like Dunbeholden who have good ball players, like a Manchester City, if you rush them they will play you out of space [so] we allowed them to play that long ball that we could win.”

He was left gushing about the character shown by his team to pull off a near-impossible win against one of the best teams in the league.

“It’s beautiful, I couldn’t ask for more. And this is what we need — with nine men or ten men — we need to fight just the same with eleven men.”

With injuries piling up and play-off football virtually secured, Davis is set to use the depth of his squad to get him through the rest of the regular season.

“We want to give some other players the opportunity to play now because we don’t want to stretch out the players. We are having injuries so now is the best time to give some players some opportunities to play,” he reasoned.

However, Arnett Gardens has Molynes United, Mount Pleasant FA, Tivoli Gardens and leaders Waterhouse in their final four games of the season, which may make resting some of their key players a little bit difficult.

— Dwayne Richards