Finally our first actual league game with points on the line. Our last couple of weeks of development team opponents were not weak, but couldn't give us any of that sweet league currency.

Disaster struck in advance with centre-forward Rob being struck down by illness only hours in advance. By induction from last week every game this season will involve one player becoming ill the night before, but hopefully all maths is wrong. That left 12 players on the field, but a strong 12 with a will to win.

The pre-match might have been vital this week. A lucky guess for the larger of the two heads on the double-headed coin giving us the sun at our backs instead of in our eyes. Did we get the better of it with more cloud cover in the second half? Could be.

The game started...quite well. Ely were a strong team in good form, making good use of space to generate chances while shutting down ours. Fortunately it turned out so are we, and soon the game settled into a back and forth mix of skilled play and losing the ball on a bad touch to give the other side a chance.

Suddenly like lightning a short corner struck to break up the routine. I don't remember our routine being very beautiful, except the last motions where after some messiness Jordan's reaching stick gave a perfect touch to knock a post ball into the goal. 1-0!

Ely had plenty of chances of their own. Their own first short was saved on the line by the post player (but maybe Miles was there anyway!), and then right before half time came the unexpected highlight of the game. A penalty stroke was awarded against us for the ball hitting a foot on the line - it does happen! Once everyone had remembered how penalty strokes work Miles intercepted the stroke with panache, the best of many great moments that eventually gave him MoM.

Half time was obviously positive. As James H wisely remarked, "if the other team are playing very strongly, and we're winning, what does that make us?".

The second half was largely more of the same, but seemed to slowly shift more in our favour. Ely had their chances and were very dangerous once around the D, but we were the ones finding the return balls to our high players and making Ely work to defend their D. In the end we found two more goals, both assisted (I think?) by James P who was unlucky not to get any of his own after some brilliant positioning all game contributing to many of our best chances. That performance made him a close MoM runner up, but Andy and Jordan got the last touch credit for actually getting the ball in the net. Jordan's came with special relief, since after beating the keeper and having a clear shot if he'd missed it would have been a clear lemon for him.

After maybe some slightly bad luck, Ely finally converted 59 seconds through the 69th minute of the game. It was well worked and well positioned from their post player tapping the ball in on its journey around the keeper, but fortunately too late to turn the tide against us.

Overall a very fun and promising game. It's easy to point out things we could improve, but let's not miss the forest for the trees: this was an excellent league performance, everyone played well together and it's a great sign for the weeks ahead. It was noted at teas that there were many excellent performances that shouldn't be overlooked: powerful hustle from Stu, excellent mobility and interceptions from Alex, Huw providing essential distribution, and honestly I could say something for everyone but I feel like I already wrote a lot of words so I'm not going to.