Mens 3 vs Cambridge South 4

It was a warm bright sunny day as St Ives turned up for their last preseason match against cambridge south 4s.

The day started promisingly as what must have been a first for the team all outfield players arrived with white socks! The warm up got underway but then after the captains/umpires talk the teams swapped ends to finish off the warm up and prepare for the game. A steller pre-match game talk from captain and vice captain (Goode and Jones) had us all ready to go. With only 1 sub for us and 0 subs for South and the hot cambridgeshire sun beating down on us it was going to be a long game for both sides.

Play started with a friendly push back from Ives to Souths left wing and things started well for Ives putting the pressure on early but South were looking dangerous on the counter and when given space to play. Ives opened the scoring from some nice build up in open play, this didn’t cause south to drop their heads, in fact their breaks became more dangerous, after one of which the ball ended up in the goal, fortunately the south player owned up that they were outside the D when they released the ball. Ives realising an opposition goal was highly possible piled on the pressure and managed to find the back of the net once again. This really caused south to attack with intent and with a strong counter and a poor pass out from defence allowed south to bring the score to 2-2 at half time.

The team talk at half time was positive, we were playing some good hockey and so long as we didn’t make any silly mistakes and kept the pressure on South a win was possible. The second half started with a silly mistake from Johnstone after a “friendly” aerial fell between the keeper and the defender meant the square pass across the D was easily picked up by South and led to South going 3-2 up. The rest of the second half was similar to the 1st, with Ives pressing hard and South breaking well leading to several goals happening for each side. Things got a bit much for one of Ives players after a close attempt on goal but a whistle in favour of South led to a disagreement between Jago and the umpire led to a green card being shown for 2 minutes. Fortunately South couldn’t capitalise on Ives being down to 10 men for those 2 minutes. With about 5-10 minutes left Ives got lucky with one of Souths players running off the pitch to go to another match meaning South would be down to 10 for the remainder of the game and by this point Ives were 1 goal up. This allowed Ives to control play in the closing minutes and keep South on the back foot.

The game finished 6-5 to Ives, shout out to Kitson scoring 4 goals on debut game earning themselves Man of the Match, Wildin and Jones rounding off the scoring.