Our last Sunday game (hopefully!), and the rematch against the Uni.  Thanks very much again to all the 2s who helped us out, you have massively saved us this weekend!

The aim of the game was to stay relaxed, and pretend we were playing someone closer to the top of the league:  we play our best hockey when playing the best teams (see recent results against City, Ipswich, Dragons) but sometimes struggle against the middling teams (see Peterborough, Spalding and last week’s Uni game).  The sun was out, we knew how to manage their half court press, we were feeling great.

The Uni had clearly decided that last week’s half court press was a bit boring (I agree) so played normally.  Excellent.  They had an early break but we kept them out of goal, and then started playing our own hockey.  We were expecting their youthful turns of speed a bit more this week, and we certainly managed them better - some great defensive efforts from Hannah, Anna, Tamsin and Carrie (MoM votes to all!) as well as Loopy saving our bacon (more MoM votes) kept the score sheet clean.

The first goal for Uni came from a fantastic deflection… from me *facepalm*.  Although in fairness the player I was marking on back post would have got the deflection had I not, so I was just keeping her off the score sheet.  This was relatively quickly followed by a lucky short corner from the Uni, leaving the half time score 2-0.

We were actually feeling quite optimistic at half time, and the score felt unrepresentative of the game.  Early on in the second half they got another one past us (I’m not sure what happened), taking us to 3-0.  We kept our heads up but unfortunately couldn’t quite convert anything in our attacking play, and we ended without any more goals.  They did decide to half court press for about 2 minutes - but thanks to the work at training we found a way through it almost immediately and they didn’t bother again, so that’s definitely a positive.  

Next week brings us City, and if we can take another point or three off them we might manage to prevent their promotion, so we’ll all be bringing our A game.  A few more points wouldn’t hurt our position in the table either!