Ladies 5's against Bicester

Bicester was always going to be a tough match!

We started off with more players than we had expected but that team included 2 or 3 currently or very recently sick people, an injured player and 2 very new newbies. Thank you very much to everyone who turned up at a frankly ridiculous time in the morning in Bicester.

Out first half was really good - we played really well and kept our intensity through the whole thing. It's a shame they managed to get a really annoying goal inside the first 2 minutes; it kind of rolled in right by the post because everyone (opposition included) stopped to watch it go off the back line - except that it didn't.
We were understandably annoyed and settled in to fight back. We made a lot of good attempts at goal, including one that they literally managed to stop on the line.

There were three attacking shorts in the first half, with both two thirds of Team Jess taking turns attempting to strike and there were some close calls but it wasn't working - until we swapped it up and put Jess W at left slip. Boycott pushed to her and she cracked it straight in for a lovely equaliser.
Buoyed by our success we kept the pressure on and moved the ball around a lot, with Anji making some great runs. Boycott got involved and put our second goal in using some great stuff we worked on in training.

We also successfully defended 4 defensive shorts in the first half, despite Bicester's best efforts making us run backwards and forwards repeatedly. Unfortunately they managed to slip a second goal in in the last 20 seconds of the half to bring the half time score to 2-2.

At half time we all sat down for a while to catch our breat, the umpires had a chat to captains who told us to tone down the physicality among other things and we all agreed to abide by this request.

Our second half started off quite defensively, again successfully defending several defensive shorts but sadly, this seriously tired us out - we were working really hard to keep the ball up the pitch but our formation got very lost and it was obvious that we were getting tired and frustrated.

There was an amazing run from Maddie to Sophie which won us an attacking short, but unfortunately we lost it and had to run back and defend. They then scored an admittedly very good 3rd goal.

With about ten minutes to go they once again got a couple of short corners in a row and we successfully defended all of them, including one shot that Helen brilliantly cleared off the line. They took advantage of our tiredness and kept the ball up our end to score another one.

The match finished 4-2.

We defended really well this week, they didn't score from any of their roughly several hundred shorts corners and while our first half was great, we got really tired in the second and let the formation fall apart.

Its great to see things we have worked on in training being used in the game and helping us to score!

Man of the Match - TJ !

Captain Pippa!