Kwesi Mugisa, Staff Reporter

Wray and Nephew National Premier League debutantes August Town earned their first points of the season when they held former champions Portmore United to a 0-0 draw at the Barbican football field yesterday.

"This was a much better effort than last week, it was a collective one we played well at both ends of the field kept our possession and basically played 90 minutes of football." was the assessment of August Town coach Christopher Bender, who saw his team go down 2-0 to defending champions Waterhouse in their season opener.

"We were much better this week at creating chances and as time goes on hopefully we will be able put away a few of them, but as debutantes I think we are off to a good start." he added.

Chances

August Town did have chances to perhaps snatch all three points, but to be fair so did Portmore, in fact the heroics of August Town custodian Devon Haughton had as much to do with the home team getting off the mark as much as anything else.

A late flurry to finish the game by the 2005 champions saw Haughton forced to make a desperate save to a shot from Portmore substitute Sheldon Palmer, who cut his defender out of the picture before releasing the 82nd minute blast from just inside the 18-yard area. Two minutes later defender Adrian Reid flashed across goal to get plenty of power into his header but the attempt did not force a save from Haughton as it flew just over the bar.

For Portmore coach Paul Young who also saw his team drop all three point's in their home opener last week, the result was a satisfactory one.

"Today we showed a lot more commitment and better attitude than we did last week." he said.

"But I think we suffered from a bit of indiscipline, we had a couple of opportunities and we should have stuck one in but we have to be satisfied with the points." he added.