Harlequins Mens Hockey Match Report

In a League Of Their Own.
By A.Mathewson

Church of Ireland (D) 7 [seven] - Harlequins (E) 0 [unfortunatly zero]

Division 3

11th November 2001 at 3:00pm

The day started well enough with more hordes of Harlequins champing at the bit and waiting for the honour of being able to play for the illustrious fifths. We had a surfeit of players again and if Quentin had not got stuck in traffic in Dublin it would have been worse. Having said that, we had the bones of a good team, but unfortunately those bones have been around for quite a while and we were playing against some very young , fit (and that was the worst part) and skilful players. If they have all left school I would be very surprised. Although we managed to get some youth onto our team as well and Mark Egner made his debut in the second half and brought down the average age of our team to something approaching forty five. He played well for the time he was on the pitch but more about that later.

We started the game with a bit of a delay, Clive has been waiting for a new kit bag for the goalie equipment for a couple of years now ( I think he asked me when I was Captain last time) and he chose this match to demonstrate the inadequacy of his facilities. Apparently his helmet must have fallen out of the bag on its way up to Garrydfuff because when we started the game he didn’t have it with him. The nice CI folks offered to lend him one, and once they installed the blindfold into it the game was ready to start. We played quite well in the opening ten minutes with end-to-end hockey and several spectacular saves from Clive despite the obvious limitations of wearing a impediment to his vision. He was obviously using the force to work out where the next shot was coming from. I hadn’t pictured Clive as a JEDI Knight but after yesterdays performance it is all coming into my picture. He had a few injuries as well and seems to need some additional protection in the knee department, which he apparently has but wasn’t wearing at the time.

We defended quite well for the first twenty minutes but the CI side were more skilful, faster and able to stop the ball from our hit outs for most of the first half and they scored some interesting and spectacular goals. One with the backside of the stick and one which no one saw go in but several of them felt the breeze as the ball went past their heads. The half ended 3-0 and although we were bolstered by a mid match pep talk from the club president and a lot of advice Thanks Pat!! (Or should I say Sir?). The coaching course seems to have had some effect because he seems to have inspired everybody who could hear him.

The second half started much the same as the first one had ended, and we had a few close things, two short corners, which were only fractionally wide, and one which ran up a defenders stick and gave one of their players a nasty looking whack on the forehead. That will teach him to be so quick out from the line when the ball is hit out. However, it really needed to have been done sooner to have had any effect on the game. It was a good try by Ashley though and it looks as if the training at short corners is starting to pay off. Peter has also advised us that we should watch the firsts and their short corners because they are inspirational and if anyone needs to be inspired it is us at the moment.

After a few more personnel changes which saw myself and Peter Payne back onto the pitch and the debut of Mark Egner (who brought a good bit of fine positional play, awareness and running to our left wing) we started to leak goals, although none of them came from our hit outs which although he wasn’t pleased with the goals conceded this pleased president Pat immensely.

They scored another four goals in the second half all of which originated from sparks of brilliance from their players and there wasn’t much that could be done about them. So we conceded 7 goals in Garyduff again. Hopefully, they will go into the top half of the league when the split takes place and we wont have to play them again.

However, in order to ensure some high spirits in the fifths we lent some of our players to the fourths so that some of our team could experience winning for a change.

That would be nice for all of us. We are playing Belvedere on Sunday and I hope we can get our annual win then.