Kieran Hall on battling back to score a vital goal
We spoke to second year scholar Kieran Hall shortly after full time at the Barnsley game on Friday night about his match-winning goal which takes the team through to a dream fourth round away tie against Leicester City.“I’m absolutely over the moon,” he said. “I’ve had to battle against injury for the second season in a row but now this has heppened. I’ve had three games in the league, just to get back into things, and I think that’s just what I needed to get me started again for the rest of the season.”
“To be fair, I still can’t believe I got the goal in that way because my first touch is appalling most of the time!” he joked. “Thankfully it worked out for me this time. I just hit it as hard as I could. I watched it come over my shoulder and after it had gone in all I could think was – how on earth did I do that!
“Everybody started celebrating and that was brilliant. It’s the biggest competition in youth football and you look forward to it all year. With me being a second year I knew this would be our last game in it, if we got knocked out, and that’s why I wanted to make the most of it.”
On why the competition is so special, he said: “You get to play in big stadiums, and Leicester is up next, so you can’t ask for much more than that. We’d all searched for Oakwell on the internet to get an idea of this one. but you still can’t believe it when you walk onto the pitch.
“You get to play under the floodlights with a decent crowd ... I don’t know what else to say because it’s just brilliant.”
Speaking about the effort which took the lads through a tough encounter, he said: “It was a team performance from back to front. I thought we did look tired at the end but we still outplayed them.
“The aim all along was to stay in the competition and the reward for us doing that is to go to play at the home of the Champions of England. Hopefully we’ll go and do things in the same way again.”
The road to round four has been particularly tough for the popular young striker as he missed out on most of the first half of the season due to a troublesome injury.
“It’s been unbelievably frustrating,” he confirmed. “There isn’t much you can do when you have a stress fracture in your back. It was total rest for three months and it was quite depressing at times.
“I had to go home, which obviously meant I wasn’t with the lads, so I spent plenty of time with my family. Jordan Beech has been with me every day since I came back and the work I’ve done with him has been to get me back to playing in this kind of game. I can’t think him enough for that. He’s been brilliant.”
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