Southend & Benfleet 1st XI 2 - 3 East London 1st XI
Again the ladies were still missing valuable members of the team with no Charlotte Rose or Chantal Heringer available and Nicola Bryant yet to return from injury we have yet to play at full strength. We were also missing our goalkeeper Lisa Ballard for the day as she slept in!!! so that left us with the bare minimum of 11 players against a side who hasn’t lost any home games yet!!! We were very optimistic!!!
So, Bex Goddard volunteered to go in goal for us, she looked absolutely awesome, we were quite scared ourselves. We started strong, managing to put the pressure on early but it didn’t make a blind bit of difference as their bias umpire gave three short corners against us that were blatant East London fowls. The umpire even threatened cards for laughing!!! How shocking! Obviously they scored from the third one but we think we would have kept on playing them all day until they did score. The umpire certainly wasn’t being fair and we were relieved when the umpires changed (not that we had agreed to this before the game started!!!) to a much fairer one. We got the goal back before half time and were much relived in the second half when we went 2-1 up. Not that we could hold it for very long. The ladies started to get tired and not having a sub really hit us hard. East London started to stick tackle every player just to break us down and stop the flow, it was a harsh tactic and East London showed that they do not play fair hockey, but simply set out to stick tackle and body check your players so they get a very luck win. Not a deserved one at all. It was disappointing to see East London resort to such desperate measures, they used to be a well structured team who could dazzle with skill. Shame.
Well played to all the ladies, who battled hard and considering the circumstances it wasn’t a bad loss. Excellent performance by Bex and thank you for stepping in, you were fab.
Team: Bex Goddard, Sandy Revell, Anne Johnson, Nicola Coleman, Steph Gregory, Lora Sharples, Kendal Colman, Adele Cole, Chloe Harris, Naomi Barker, Sarah Watkinson.
Goal Scorers: Sarah Watkinson 2 |
