Ladies 4s Take 3-1 Win Over London Eds

Ladies 4s 3 - 1 London Edwardians L1

When we sign up for hockey at the beginning of the season, we forget that we might have to travel for two hours to Honour Oak Park for a 1pm pushback, so no surprises that most of the team were praying for our game this weekend to be frozen off. The most intelligent of us booked birthday weekends away and the rest of us got stitched up with the game still being on. This meant we arrived late, had a five minute warm up and spent some time happily watching a Men's team pouring water on their frozen pitch... which didn't work for them, obviously.

Once we did get started, we were seriously lethargic. The adults felt old, the adolescents were hungover and the kids hopefully weren't, but looked a bit like they could have been. So we went 0-1 down and then started to actually get into the game. There were quite a few scrabbling opportunities in front of goal, including Bethan (softly) pushing a ball at an open goal for it to be retrieved off the line by one of their defenders. Finally, we did manage to score after a nice period of open play and Bethan pushing the ball a little bit harder to successfully get on the score sheet!

We went into half time at 1-1, Tarek gave us a fairly firm talking to and we all agreed we could try a little bit harder. Dream team talk, the second half was a million times better. Lizzie and Issy, despite their sore heads, were in control at the back. Libby made some great saves and our forwards were making visionary runs and getting shots on goal. Apart from Chantelle, who wanted all the glory and hit a ball about 10metres above the goal "aiming for the top corner." Caragh and Sally were amazing in midfield and helped build our play moving forward, leading to loads of shots on goal and some short corners. Thankfully, this meant Chantelle did eventually score, so we'll let her off her earlier terrible aim – 2-1 to Surby.

We carried on our strong play, Sunny took a hilarious sideline squarial and then after some champagne hockey and passing around, Karen slotted in a goal through the keeper's legs about two minutes before the final whistle. A nice 3-1 win and then we got pizza for teas. Almost worth the trek to HoP, maybe.