[NoSkillz]

Tue. July 19, 2022

Preseason Friendly
Dover vs. Olympique Lyonnais (France Ligue 1)
Dover Athletic Ground, Dover, UK

Olympique Lyonnais are the defending French Ligue 1 champions and Champions League finalists. This is an elite club and they'll give us a much tougher match than Ipswich.

Once again, we'll go with a relatively full strength side for today's contest. New GK Manuel Perez will start, Paulus Tjiuoro will man DC and Kostas Zagos will play DL, otherwise we'll start the same players as the Ipswich game.

Dover: 4-4-2 Control
GK - M. Perez
D - K. Zagos, P. Tjiuoro, R. Hamon, S. Loucif
M - A. Bamba, N. Cairney, A. Rocca, G. Allan
S - S. Andrea, Chiquinho

Dover 4 - 1 Olympique Lyonnais
Goals - Chiquinho 2 (9.3), Arsene Bamba (7.4), Steve Ingram (7.4)
Assists - Chiquinho, Shanon Andrea (7.2), Shaun Spall (6.9)
Man of the Match - Chiquinho
Other Dover Notables - Manuel Perez (7.4), Salim Loucif (7.2), Paulus Tjiuoro (7.2), Neil Cairney (7.3), Andrea Rocca (5.8)
Attendance - 10,679

Chiquinho is SO good. He's going to be a delight to watch this year - equally adept with both feet by the looks of it and so explosive. Perez looked great in goal and we HUMBLE one of the best teams in the world, albeit in a meaningless game. Still, we'll take it! Not sure why Rocca's rating suffered.

-- Gianluca Bolis returns to full training after missing three weeks with a twisted knee.



Transfer OUT

-- This was not planned whatsoever but Everton made an official enquiry into the availability of third string DR Jozef Kuciak - I asked for more than twice his worth, not thinking they'd bite but they did and I decide to accept the £4 million and give him a chance at some more playing time. Kuciak came here on a free from Liverpool in 2018 and played four full seasons for our squad. He was a rotational starter for two of the seasons and a backup for the other two but he always played great when called upon and always seemed to outplay his skill level. He leaves Dover having played 66 league games and notching 3 assists. Good luck to Jozef in Everton.



Next Up

-- We head out on our annual tour, this time venturing to Holland to face Ajax in our first match then PSV two days later.