The sun was shining, when the L5s turned up to Wilberforce road…….well most of us did, Rebecca being too cool for Wilber made her way to long road first before realising her error, though after a speedy dash she made it before the start of the game! 

Rosie massively stepped up and made a rare appearance in goal for us (given our lack of goalie) and she rose to the challenge by putting the pads on upside down to start with, though she made up for this with her stellar saves in the warm up! 

We were feeling positive about the game, given our recent unbeaten form, however we were keen not to be complacent and thus we had good pre-match team talk, which involved warnings that the younger legs in the opposition may be speedy so to watch for this! 

The match got underway and we were quick to stamp our dominance on the game, by our continued attacking prescence. Charlotte, Holly and Sarah were positioning themselves excellently for passes from the midfield and kept a constant pummelling of shots at the goalie. After 2 mins of play, we achieved our first short corner, we battled hard but ultimately did not score. This was to be a recurring theme, having some 26 short corners in the game but only converting on two of these! Sadly the video evidence is 23 videos of failure and no one recording when Holly actually hit the back of the net 10 mins in with a great goal during a short corner! 

The midfielders Fi, Louisa, Polly and Emma were working hard and we continued our heavy attacking presence. 

Our defence was strong when the young opposition legs made some occasional breaks, and these were chased down by Rebecca, Nicole, Daisy, Annabelle and Vicky and distributed back through the mids to the forwards quickly! 

After some fumbling play from the opposition, a heftily lifted ball into Charlotte threatened to keep her on the subs bench, but she is a brave lady and her feisty nature brought her straight back on to keep the attacking challenges up.   

Following a 12th short corner, a beautiful pass to Polly who was perfectly positioned on the left post, allowed her to tap in our second goal! 

We went to half time with our heads held high and our mouths full of jelly babies, whilst deciding we needed to pass the ball around the goalie, not just send it straight to her and also use our wings more. 

And this we did with great aplomb in the second half, driving up the wings and doing some spectacular passing!

We continued to put pressure on their goal and pushed their goalie to new limits, when she was forced to spread out like a snow angel to stop our continued attack on their goal. This earnt us our 20th short corner and here we stayed with a further 6 short corners consecutively, for what felt like most of the second half!

The opposition finally turned our attack over and took their 16 hit out rather too aggressively, lifting the ball into our beautiful Polly’s face. This halted the game somewhat and with only 5 mins left, the decision was made to end the game so poor Polly could head to A&E for 16 stitches! 

The POM was shared between Polly (great drives and a great goal as well as putting on a brave face with her injury) and Fi (great drives, passes and doctoring when called upon), with special mention to Rosie for taking on the goalie kit! 

The LOM was closely fought and challenged by Louisa, who when trying to comfort an injured Polly, actually then head butted her, adding a new concussion to the issue. However, ultimately LOM went to Rebecca for turning up to the wrong game and the wrong pitch. 

We are looking forward to our Polly’s face being healed for our continued onslaught of the division after Xmas, hopefully Santa will bring us the title since we have been nice all year!