Mens 2nd Team Vs Loughborough Town

We went into the game a bit apprehensive, with call ups to the 1s, absences and injury robbing us of six players - but reassured that the club's strength in depth has really improved this year so we were still able to field a strong squad of 13 players. We were also hoping that our new pitch would mean that the Uni's waterbased pitch was less alien than it has been in the past, which should reduce the home advantage a bit.

Fortunately for us, the home team were in a similar position to us with regards to missing players so it was going to be a real "battle of the squads".

As expected, Loughborough started strongly and put us under early pressure - but we managed to hold out and the game settled down a bit before we then scored from a short corner. At half time, we knew we'd done well to be ahead despite not playing our best hockey and that we'd need to up our game to hang on to the lead.

Again, Town started the half strongly, but this time we countered more effectively, with improved play all over the pitch - until the home side's stalwart forward scored a superb individual goal on the break to level the match. We were not to be denied though and hit back shortly afterwards with a short corner which seemed to shock the keeper with a deceptive lack of pace, going straight through his legs.

The home side pushed strongly for an equaliser as the game drew to a close, earning a number of short corners but some excellent defending & real team effort managed to keep them at bay.

A great performance all round - evidenced by the wide spread of MoM votes (no-one got more than 2) & some real grit shown. Special thanks to Dan for his £15 extra contribution to fines courtesy of picking up both green and yellow cards - thankfully he didn't come close to getting the full set! Somehow Pirate only managed £5 for a green...