40 mile an hour winds. Check.
No showers or teas post-game. Check.
Ominous cawing travelling on the winds from nearby Crowland. Check.

This could mean only one thing…the 2020/21 hockey season was back upon us! Hooray!

A band of fourteen cold-eyed killers - mainly defenders - stood shivering on the sidelines ready to do battle once more with Div 3NW. From the first whistle however South were on the back foot as Spalding efficiently moved the ball around, driven on by their very useful number 3. If you were to look up ‘Effective hockey’ in the Macmillan Book of Hockey - a must read - you’d probably just see a team photo of Spalding’s M2s - and sure enough South had subsided to a three-nil deficit by halftime, almost entirely by stealth.

What the scoreline didn’t quite reflect was a glut of gilt-edged chances as the ball just failed to fall for us. And so we found ourselves lining up for the second half, eleven Spalding players facing off against the ten of South [my fault], buoyed with cautious optimism.

With the introduction of the moustachioed Peter ‘Sixpence None The’ Richer into midfield, South suddenly found themselves playing with more urgency and some much needed thrust. Sure enough Richer’s ’tache lit up as the ball broke to him in the D and he fired a drag flick past the stricken keeper.

Suddenly a three-one scoreline was looking much rosier as South scented blood - another fine move along the byline led to Mariano firing narrowly wide. Sadly however the scent of blood turned out to be nothing more than the smell of cabbages on the freezing easterly breeze. Spalding once again showed us the importance of dead-eyed finishing as their superannuated forwards put their teammates in at the post a further two more times.

As the final whistle blew we were transported back to the harsh realities of life in the 3^rd Division. Ultimately Cambridge South M2s are a team that takes a little while to get going but, once they do, prove incredibly hard to stop. Much like Peter Richer’s Renault Picasso, I thought to myself, as it flew through the sunlit uplands of Crowland, the cawing having increased to a deafening roar in the bleak Fenland skies.