Wandering Lost
Maikel Resumes
Rotteveel was clearly not amused about his duck egg in Grilled's S-League opener against RaZer, and vented it on unfortunate amateur side North Wanderers who suffered four from him alone. Subri contributed two before half-time but never got to finish his hat-trick, leaving Rotteveel to claim the match ball uncontested.
With Grilled abandoning their policy of exposing youths in the earlier Cup rounds, the result was quite a foregone conclusion. A spate of energetic defending kept Grilled out for twelve minutes, when Rotteveel ran in on the outside of quirky fullback Lam Qian-Hua to slot a through pass home.
Wanderers were unlucky to lose the 42 year-old Zulharisan bin Kamaruddin on perhaps his second touch of the ball after the kick-off, as
Fabian Bona didn't pull any punches going into the slightly out-of-shape metalworker. Though probably not a foul among professionals, the challenge left Zulharisan wincing on his butt, and without any substitutes Wanderers had to continue without him.
The carnage continued as Rotteveel angled in an impressive long shot, then bumped the ball in at point-blank range to complete his hat-trick in the 36th minute. The crowd started to get warmed up, and Grilled's slower pace didn't stop Malaysian ex-U20 forward
Subri bin Ku Zainol from adding two more before the break.
Sid got on the scoresheet for the third time in as many games off a free-kick, and Rotteveel got lucky with a hard but catchable strike that Wanderers goalkeeper Liu Gui-Jin misjudged badly. Liu, a physical education teacher by profession, had actually been one of Wanderer's more outstanding performers, and the game would certainly have gone into double digits without some sharp positioning and sprinting from him.
Liu couldn't do much against a two-on-one break that saw Mirchev unselfishly pass for Bona to tap in after a corner was only half cleared, before
Lim Chuan Jing celebrated his first senior goal, a real scorcher that went between two defenders and lifted the netting explosively.
A fifty-fifty fall by
Ivaylo Mirchev wasn't looked generously upon by the referee who may have thought seeking a tenth goal this way was a bit too much, and the Bulgarian striker was smart enough not to contest the booking. It could still have reached that mark had Rotteveel been given a bit more time in the 82nd minute, but he was too quickly swarmed by defenders and could only manage to ping the left goalpost.
