4-4 Draw vs West Hampstead W3
Match report by Michelle Joubert
What a Saturday! ANOTHER CRAZY goal heavy draw for us as we took on West Hampstead W3’s at Brent Cross this past weekend!
Each and every week we get better and better as a team and this weekend is no different!
The way of the women’s 4s is what we can call it – that sneaky tactic where we let the oppo get ahead of us in the first half and we regroup and kick butt in the second!
This game was the best of that! It didn’t take long for us to go 1..2…3…nil down in the first half! Taking a breather at half time and a good team chat we came out ready to fight in round 2!
A slight slow down 5 minutes into the second half as Lena, show no mercy, Lawal ran first wave on a short corner and got a ball whacked right into her eye! Taking a quick second to realise it was a pretty hefty knock, Lena and our team, filled with physios, trainee vets and future doctors took no time at all in grabbing every first aid kit and sorting her out! Lena – you absolute superstar, so brave! No tears, and a big old knock! (Lena proceeded to stay to support – mostly angry she couldn’t play the rest of the game, then headed off to A&E where she finally got home at 11pm that night after some stitches!)
Back to the second half of the game… Alex kicked things off with getting us a penalty flick, see video… sadly missing her “I’ve got this in the bag” shimmy before ace-ing it bottom right! Here we go! 1-3…
The 3 goals that followed could have been in any order, but essentially the team fought endlessly for every ball near them in our attacking D!
Our succession rates on short corners are finally something to shout about, not on what we plan to often do but in how we recover and smash it on wave two, with goal no 2 coming from just this when we got our second goal from a recovered attempt with a straight strike top D from Michelle, always a great feeling when they come off right!
Goal 3 and 4, again tireless efforts from the team, check out video no 2 for a lesson in “everyone in the D” with 6 of us up there and working hard to get it past the oppo, a second goal came for Michelle! There it was 3-3!!!
Final goal of the day, a real cracker and another example of picking up every opportunity we could, a very bouncy ball being swept out by their defence, picked up mid air, controlled and shot right back in to P spot where Caroline was ready to sweep in the deflection!! 4-3!!
We couldn’t quite believe how the game had turned, we dominated in that second half, the team came together and worked tirelessly and non stop the entire time!!
Sadly we couldn’t quite keep the lead and they popped one more sneaky goal past us near the end of the game making it 4-4!
We so deserved to win that game, but we will take the 4-1 result from the second half and the 1 point on the table for now!
Well done again to our fantastic team, case in point with joint MVPs this week to Alex, Lucy R and Niah!
❤️🖤❤️🖤