This morning all the players woke with great excitement ahead of kick-off at the tournament venues. As reported yesterday, there were many fixtures for everyone today.

With most of our teams starting with 10-00am kick-offs an early start was required with showering, breakfast, preparation and travel to the venues we were due to play at before play.

Please find below a round -up of all our teams from Thursday's fixtures.

Steve King's Centre of Excellence Squad only had just one fixture today which they won quite easily by 7-0. This is a good start to their fixtures, although be rest assured they will come across tougher opposition in the coming days. Wiggins x 2, Hooligan x 2, Brown, Volk and Fogg were the scorers.

James Powell's Squad today competed in 2 fixtures which they drew 1-1 in a tighly fought contest with Woolf scoring, followed by a 6-0 victory with Charlie Clark x 3, Euan Sykes x2 and Danny Hurford scoring. James has been pleased with the team performance to date with particular praise going Oliver Clark and Mitchell Sweeney. Again they will they will be keen to build on this tomorrow.

Ben Duncan's Squad drew their first game 3-3 with Mitchel Cox, Toby Coker and Daniel Rogers all scoring in a game which they felt they should have won with the chances created. Their second fixture was a 3-0 victory however this was award due to the oppositions non appearance. The team's next fixture is against the host club, although this should not be too tough considering their first two results to date. Ben is very happy and pleased with the squad's spirit and performance to date and will be looking for them to build on their first day's success.

Ginge's squad had the busiest of all squads today after playing 4 fixtures. They began their campaign by winning 5-0 against German opponents with Gosling x 2, Reeve x 2 and Kateley scoring. This was followed by a 13-0 win, wíth GK Matthew Barrett getting on the scoring act as an outfield player in the second half. Kateley x 3, Reeve x 3, Barrett x 2, Johnston x 2, Froud x 2, Marrable x 1 all completed the scoring.

The next fixture was a more tougher contest by beating Brondby 4-2 in a good game. Max Day, Reeve and Johnston found the net on this occassion. Their final fixture was against Lyseng which our opponents won 5-2. This was a very good game, which had us performing poorly to start with, including a missed penalty by Reeve at 0-1 although Max Day did equalise for us. A mad ten minute spell saw us concede 4 goals to put us 1-5 down at the break. A stern team talk at half-time had the youngsters eager to demonstrate that the 1st half was hopefully a one-off, as we won the second half 1-0 despite us also missing a host of opportunities.

It is likely we will meet this team again later in the tournament, so the players will be keen to put the score right and despite this defeat, the response had been very positive and hope to build from this in our next fixture. They were disappointed by the score although this may be a blessing in disguise as the boys began to be too confident about the games, although they were warned about the surprise package that they would meet. They have now been remindered there is no such thing as an easy team.

As you can see the day has been full of action and the players have been in continually in high spirits as well as working hard for each other both on and off the pitch. The weather is dry, overcast with a slight sea breeze and this is likely to be the same tomorrow and we are all looking forward to the next day of fixtures as we all strive towards performing the best we can with a positive outcome in terms of a result.

Tomorrow (Friday), all 3 Shadow Squads have just 1 fixture, with the Centre of Excellence Squad having 2 fixtures in the Elite Section. The Shadow squad players will be going to watch the Centre of Excellence play in at least one of their fixtures tomorrow as we all continue to support each other in the name of Southend United Football Club.

All the scores can be found by logging on to the Norhalne Cup website www.norhalne-cup.dk

Marc Tracy