Ladies’ 7s overcome by Oxford

It was a very cold Saturday morning at BRN, and we knew we were in for a tough match, playing the team top of the table and having no subs. We got off to a good start managing to get a few break-away attacks, but we spent most of the first half defending. Both Charlottes were solid in defence, managing to stop many attacks by Oxford and Daisy made some great saves in goal. Unfortunately, Oxford managed to pass it around their attack to score two goals before half time. The half time talk was very positive, and we discussed making sure we got more people in their opposition D and trying to get more short corners or shots.

We came out in the second half with much slicker passing and spent much time in the opposition half. Eventually this pressure paid off when we started winning more short corners. On one short corner, Esther slipped a lovely ball to Jill who did a fabulous strike towards goal which hit a defender’s foot on the line resulting in a penalty flick scored by Kim. Oxford unfortunately got a goal back quickly, but Hawks were able to respond almost straight away with a powerful run up midfield by Hannah who then slotted it into the bottom corner. At this point Hawks were only losing by 3-2 and looked incredibly positive. Unfortunately, Sophie took a ball to the head not long after so had to go off to get a bandage on it. Charlotte C did a very good job with the bandage and was able to luckily stop the bleeding. However, there was now only 9 of us playing against their 11 so we were outnumbered, especially missing two defenders. Oxford were able to make use of these numbers to score another two goals before the end of the match, despite valiant defence by Charlotte V, Eleanor and Hannah and some incredible saves by Daisy.

The final score was 5-2 to Oxford, with none of us thinking that was a fair reflection of the match. There was a high standard of play across the whole team, shown by lots of people getting nominated for player of the match: Anna, Daisy, Kim, Ester, Jill and Charlotte C. The player of the match this week went to Hannah, who had a very good game controlling central midfield and made many good runs up the pitch.