COWHC Ladies 2s vs Epsom Ladies 5s - 22nd Sept 2018

The first league game back after a scorcher of a summer and we were greeted immediately with the reality of the hockey season. Goodbye sunshine, hello rain.

Winding our way through the building site to Epsom's brand new Astro (soon to be overlooked by some new retirement home buildings too.. yeh that's way more interesting than a sea view guys!), we arrived ready for the inaugural match of the season.

Hampered by illness, injury and babies (congrats Naomi) both on and off the pitch (well maybe not babies on the pitch, unless Pav counts), we had the misfortunate of being limited to a tight eleven. But hey, Croydon 2s work best in adversity.

Sharon in goal was tremendous in stopping and saving throughout but one cheekily slipped by her in the first half. The defence line also showed true grit under pressure with How Hard, Vic, Legs and Netty working incredibly hard to keep that ball out of our goal. As always, Captain Nicky was ever present up and down the length of pitch creating the opportunities for attacking Pav (that's an adjective not a verb... sorry Pav, I seem to be picking on you in this report). Stacey and Jo were switching and running and generally trying to keep an eye on the oppo's slippery number 32 in the middle, whilst there was some inspiring stuff from Sam and Andrea on the right wing.

We had some close short corners, but a goal evaded us until the beginning of the second half when Stacey dinked the ball past their final defender into a space where Jo could pick it up and pop it nicely to the left of a running goalie and into the corner of the goal.

Our spirits buoyed by even Stevens, the great team play just continued with everyone on the pitch working 100%. A worrying moment came when Epsom scored again, but Martin disallowed it. Cheers Martin :-).

The 'landslide' victory of POM votes for me of 3.5 made up of mostly half points... just goes to show how much this game's result was down to a complete team effort. A solid, exciting and promising start to the season. Whoop whoop.

Teas: Quiche and salad. 8/10 for healthiness, 6/10 for taste. Clubhouse: 8/10: the positive being the view of the men's lacrosse team, the negative, they could have been a bit closer.
Thanks to Martin for umpiring and injured Dicko for hobbling along as a super sub and giving a couple of players a much needed quick breather.
POM Jo Douglas
Goal Jo Douglas