Ladies 5s Share the Spoils with London Eds
By Sunny Pottay
Ladies 5s 2 – 2 London Eds 2s
This week’s match report is from our unanimous DoD, Sunny.
On what was a gloomy Saturday, we travelled away to London Eds. The journey can only be described as long, long and long! What with the usual rail network glitches and rail replacement buses…thanks South Western!
We hadn’t even started the warm up when Sunny realised she had driven over an hour to play, and left her shin pads at home! So it was either play without and be hard as nails or plead with the opposition to borrow some!… thanks to the ump’s kindness she made the shin pads fit!
The Fab 5s started strong, keeping much of the possession with a few near misses on the goal line, due to their stealthy defence denying us the goals. Much of the game at that end could have been played without the umpire but nevertheless, we ploughed on trying to weave our way to their goal, although the Velcro pitch certainly had us tripping over our own feet. Billy’s ten pages of notes clearly made a difference as we pressed effectively and forced the opposition to pass back. The half time whistle had us at 0-0.
In the second half we continued to push very high after Emily’s positive half time talk. Rosina and Amber linked well to create some moments and pressure in the opposition half. Suddenly we earned a short corner with Helen converting a short slip and slap into the left corner… 1-0 at last! The team were pumped and more traffic into the attacking circle led to another short. Mimi stepped up to inject and sent it straight out to Amber (who had woken up for this one!), who sent it straight back to Mimi on the left post. Mimi fired it home for us to go 2-0 up.
Being on the up we started to increase the pace on the pitch and continued to push high. However, a few fumbles and poor passes on the Velcro led to the opposition turning the ball over and catching us on the hop! Rightly so we were punished, despite Marlijn’s awesome saves and efforts to stop two quick goals. She made some epic one-on-one sliding saves to keep us in the game. It was 2-2 with ten minutes to go with us continuing to pile on the pressure. As usual Evie battled to make ground by taking on their defenders but alas, it finished a draw.
Congratulations to Mimi who put on a POM performance in comparison to Sunny who just made a comedy of errors! The journey home was long! Oh and Sunny also went the wrong way down a one way street on leaving the ground…but we all got home safely folks!