1XI Girls Hockey vs King Edward’s, Southampton

The pre match preparation began in Mr Hicks’ classroom before the game, where Soma talked to us about tactics for what was thought to be, by their reputation and their recent win over us and the rest of the county too, a hard match. So with many drawings of pitches and passes represented by arrows in our heads, we set off to the pitch.

After warming up and winning the toss, our game began: We had control of most of the possession in the beginning 20 minutes of the first half, with many transfers around the back and therefore passes up the wing to Helen and Kate, we were powering down their defence. We obtained 2 attacking penalty corners, where despite our efforts, were unsuccessful. All we wanted was a goal, as we had the ball more often than not. After 20 minutes, we slowly began to tire and let our guard down a little allowing them a few attempts on goal which were expertly defended by Rosie and our able keeper Abi.

And so the first half came to an end and with a team talk by Soma where the phrase “We could win this” came up more than a few times, this then had us all rallying to go again.

The second half began and again we had the ball most of the time, but instead of converting it in the circle, we would be tackled before we got a chance to shoot, so the crosses from Kate to Jazz, Hannah and Natasha just kept coming but we couldn’t seem to get on the end of them. Until, a pass from deep inside the right corner of our own half went to Megan, the left inside forward, who was all alone in the middle. At this point she powered up the pitch with the ball on the end of her stick, it looked like nothing would stop her: and nothing did. She kept going all the way until she hit one of their sticks at which point it rebounded and she shot into the goal, past the keeper’s right hip. We had scored!

All that was needed now was to keep that lead up, but we can be very complacent which can sometimes be our downfall, so although there were 3 penalty corners against us in the last few minutes we held it together to win the game.

The message from Soma and Mr Hicks was that “that was the best hockey I have ever seen an LWC girls team play” so it was smiles all round!

Jess  Mann – 1^st XI Captain