Southgate (a)

Staines 2-0 Southgate

MOM - Rich Green
DOD - Larry

With the league re-structuring to include some of the London league teams, we knew this would be a tough match against a Southgate team who had been scoring freely over the past few weeks but also managing to concede quite alot of goals.
Having a 3 o'clock pushback was quite unusual but the warm up went well and the team were confident of keeping the unbeaten run going and to overtake Oxford if they slipped up against Henley.
The match started at a frenetic pace with both teams closing the space down well and not letting anyone settle on the ball.
Southgate had a couple of forrays into the staines half when their defenders went on abit of a wobble and fizzed the ball across the goal. One of the Southgate forwards decided that he would spend more time trying to push people over and telling the umpire what to do rather than actually play hockey. The match was pretty even with both teams defending well and passing the ball nicely. Staines scored the opening goal with a lovely pass from James Laz to find Matt who notched his 7th goal of the season. A couple of minutes later, a flowing move resulted in Rich Green on the penalty spot to sweep home the second goal, unfortunately he managed to hit the post and to keep Southgate thinking they could get back into the match. A well deserved lead for all the hard work put in over the first half. Southgate felt hard done by at half time as they couldn't believe they could ever be losing a match.
After words of encouragement and half time stuff from the coach, staines went out to start the second half knowing that they had to keep up the effort and skill levels.
The second half was very evenly matched like the first with Staines limiting the Southgate players to fizzing the ball in from wide angles. As the Southgate players got increasingly agitated, they started to dribble more and more which resulted in us picking them off. One such tackle resulted in the Southgate player wondering how he couldn't get through! This was met by a couple of responses from the Staines players (unrepeatable on a match report) to remind the player of what happened in no uncertain terms.
As the rain poured down, we decided that a second goal would be quite nice, the team performed a lovely passing move that resulted in the ball being tapped home by Sam Betts for his first league goal for Staines.
Some more stick ball carried on for the rest of the match which included a DOD pass from Larry to keep things interesting! Staines saw the game out and to continue a fine start to the season with 5 wins out of 6 and still unbeaten. Oxford had beaten Henley so stayed top but some good results elsewhere where Surbiton and Bournemouth dropped points against teams lower in the league reminded everyone that each match needs the team to perform. A welcome reminder as we host Richmond 2s next Saturday to keep up the winning run before we face Oxford the week after.