Saturday brought the excitement of a morning game, and no Sunday fixture - giving those L1s attending the social on Saturday evening plenty of time to make their costumes and then recover from all the fun.  We assembled bright eyed and bushy tailed, slightly disappointed to see we had been allocated the smallest changing room at Wilberforce Road, but raring to go. 

Following some insider info from Lizzie about the Uni’s expected formation, we made our way onto the pitch.  For some reason we had been granted the honour of Pitch 1 - therein followed a lengthy discussion as to whether anyone had played on a pitch other than the one in the corner (Pitch 2?).  A solid warm up, and the sun was shining.  What could go wrong?

As it transpires, advance warning that the opposition are going to half court press isn’t actually that useful when we’ve never practiced playing against a team doing it.  And to be fair to the University team, they caught us a little by surprise with their seemingly endless energy, mountain of substitutes, and speedy skills.  Although the possession throughout the game was fairly evenly split, the first half brought a number of short corners for the Uni and eventually the ball found the backboard.  In another short corner, yours truly found herself on the floor as she dived to reach the ball as it went past. Or at least that’s one version of events, the other possibly being that there was a bit of slip and slide in an attempted change of direction.  The jury is out as to which was accurate, and the affair earned me both PoM and LoM.

Sometime later in the first half, the Uni managed to score again and then they really settled into a defensive strategy.  Despite a few breaks through their press and a couple of short corners, we couldn’t quite get a goal and the game ended 2-0.  Perhaps a slightly unfair representation of the game, for which a draw would have been reasonable.  What is guaranteed is that we’ll be better prepared for their speed and formation when we play them again - next Sunday, in fact - and hopefully we will get a better result. 

PoM votes were very rightly spread across the team - although we didn’t get the result we wanted, we kept our heads up and spirits high.  And whatever the result, we now know that we have a witty Instagram caption awaiting us every week, courtesy of our new social media manager Maddy T.  @cshc_l1s if you’d like to see what we get up to!