On Sunday, Mary, Sophie, Cath, Tammy, HelenH and Flic headed over towards Minsthorpe, nr Wakefield, for the first tournament of the Yorks League novice season, hooray!
There were less teams than expected, as Loughborough were nowhere to be seen, and York and Leeds had not managed to field teams - York instead formed a scratch team of random blokes, including our own Jimbob, with special rules where they had to shoot from behind the halfway line, to make it a bit fairer.
First up, we played Kingston-upon-Hull. This is the point where we realised that other teams had been doing training, how about that, and we briefly wished we’d actually gotten around to playing together as a team maybe once before the match. Quickly we were 1-0 down, and then 2-0. Soon everyone began to get the hang of things again, and realised we needed a more solid defense. So we pulled things together again, the score at half time back to 2-1. In the second half, Kingston scored again. Next, Sophie’s [Edited, sorry Cath!] penalty ball hit the post, but she quickly recovered and scored, and another goal by us, brought us to a happy 3-3 draw, phew!
Our second game, we played Loughborough, who had managed to turn up half an hour into the tournament. Every motorway on the east side of England was closed, but they had found a route through somehow. We had a nice game against Loughborough Uni, don’t remember the score, but we won, yay, and ditto Shefield Uni, so far two games won, and one drawn.
For our final game, we needed to think a bit more about how to go about things - we were against local team FOA, including our Emily, and they had proper tactics, overloading our defense, and also going for a quick break. FOA got the first two goals, in quick succession, and they were managing to successfully break and get past us, so again we needed to shore up our defense. But by playing with confidence and oomph, Flic, Cath, Sophie and Tammy were able to get up to the front and score some goals, while Mary held the goal-line solid. A tense finish where we were blown for paddle fouls and FOA seemed set to score, but the finishing hooter was on our side, and the final score was 3-2 to us, hurrah!
Overall: Won 3 and drew 1.
Big, big thanks Sambo and Mary for doing the driving, and Jimbob for doing our reffing, Andy and others for lending us proper boats, and Alison and Sophie for organising, brilliant!
Very fun, looking forward to the next one, which will be on Sat December 13th at York from 5pm.
In the meantime, there’s another Uni tournament for everyone, at the docs on Sunday December the 7th, woooo - that’s a men’s team and a women’s team, so get in touch with Sophie if you would like to play. The previous one was very good fun - see Flic and Karlis’s docks polo report and pictures by Susan B.
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