The L2s went into this home match against Haverhill with high motivation, third in the league, there are still hopes for promotion, so every point counts. After a short pep talk from Louisa we set off for our usual warm up to the car park. The weather seemed warm(ish) and dry, so most of the team decided against skins. Spoiler - they would regret this decision.

Our tactics were simple: start with high pressure and score a goal in the first five minutes, even without our early goal scorer, Eimear. Instead, Izzy took over the responsibility and scored after three minutes, a beautiful straight shot from a short corner placed neatly inside the right post. It should be raining goals in no time we thought, but then it quite literally started raining. And then the rain turned to sleet. This is when the match reporter has a blank, probably caused by brain freeze.

There weren’t many opportunities for the defence to warm up. Haverhill arrived without any subs and their main tactic was to try and hit the ball through our lines to their two junior players in the front. When a stray ball did manage to get through our press (which wasn’t often), our defence was awake enough to stop any real threat to our goal (did Emma even touch the ball once?) Although most of the match was played in and around the oppositions’ D, we got a surprisingly low number of actual shots on target, which were then mostly stopped by their goalie. We’ll just assume this was because of the rain clouding our vision. There were a few close misses, where balls seemed to find the holes in our sticks. At some point a few of our players were on the ground in front of the goal and there was a lot of shouting going on.

We had a few shorts, we could have had a flick, Rebecca — who got two MoM votes for dominating the midfield — stopped an aerial with ease, but still no ball found the goal. At some point it did though: apparently Katherine missed the ball, but Tuffers was right behind her and flicked it in.

The match reporter was busy dreaming of pizza and tea and got a bit confused in the last seconds of the game, taking the ball and walking it off the field. This somehow got her unanimous LoM votes. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about Harriet hitting one of the junior’s feet.

MoM went to Annie (second time in a row) for amazing runs all over the field and great positioning into the D. Harriet also got two votes for her solid defending and Jenny one for playing all the defence positions (someone must have felt bad for all the LoM votes).

Katie G nearly threw up her pizza by the mere suggestion of going to watch the M1s in the rain (“I swear it was only a burp.”) Although we could have scored a few more goals, we are still third in the league and all our toes survived the cold.