Final day of the half term holidays, for some relief that their kids go back to school, for some sadness that they have to go back to work, for all another chance to play together with this fantastic team. For those who had played the day before, boots needed cleaning, shin pads finding and for Anna perhaps trying to bring the correct mouth guard would have been advisable. Super proud that our 3s had held the Uni girls to a draw the day before we knew that this would be tough game and that young legs would be back for more!

Pre match warm up is never a dull moment, Nikki took a ball to the face, Sophie EDDY learnt a valuable lesson that PE is the most important subject in school (she then warmed up Maggie?), Alice couldn’t count to 3 in time and the small issue of Durham Uni also wearing white, I knew those aged 4 bibs would come in handy one day and I’m not sure we got them all back in or if they’ll be worn on nights out in Durham.

After calm words from Becks asking us to step off and get into the game, we set off at 100mph attacking from the start. With some tenacious running from our forward line and great follow ups from our mids we kept winning the ball back in our attacking half. Despite lots of attacks and short corners we struggled to get the ball into the back of the goal, but we never panicked and even the ‘game changers’ on the sidelines can be congratulated for assisting in winning some of the PCs, well done Jude, your presence on the sideline encouraged Jemma to win a short corner!

Half time and with the score at 0-0 we knew things would come, we just needed to keep putting things into practice. It wasn’t long into the half that Cate made one of her famous runs along the base line and despite calls to pull the ball back she managed to score yet another goal from an impossible angle. In training sessions up and down the country coaches will be staying “you’re never going to score from this angle…… unless you’re Cate Kalson)

You would hope that a goal would settle the team, but no we decided to see how we would do with a player less, Nikki took the 1st green card for not being 5 (she won’t do that again!) and then Hels forgot what she was playing and casually stopped the ball with her foot(left foot as well, not my strongest). Despite having a stick in my hand it’s easy to forget and I have spent a lot of the weekend worrying that someone will lob Maggie as she’s often half way up the pitch!

Back to full strength and up steps Chell, who skillfully received a ball in the corner, took on her player and boom goal number 2, beautiful and spectacular. We will call this goal, ‘A Chell Classic’. If honest when writing a match report the game is always a bit of a blur, but what is for certain is that this was a great game of hockey with great movement off the ball, a real desire to work as a team and support each other. There were some fantastic passages of play, some great jumping back if we lost the ball and you can just see what we work on in training applied into games. Every single player in todays team contributed to the fantastic performance as did coach Becks. We hope those recovering from Mairead’s wedding also enjoyed the game, it was lovely to have the support.

POM : Jemma