Harlequins Mens Hockey Match Report

Torrid Times in Garryduff

Church Of Ireland (E) 7 [Seven] - Harlequins (E) 1 [Just one!]

Division 3

28th October 2001 at 3:00pm (ish..)

When I was a much younger person there was an advert on TV that was being used for selling Horlicks or soup or something.....

Picture the scene. A concerned mother wandering the house looking for her upset child. Then upon hearing some snuffling etc in his bedroom, she looks under the bed with the cup of whatever fluid it was in her hand and says those immortal words ‘Don’t worry David every goalie lets in ten goals once in their life’ Do you know why they don’t let in more than ten? Because once having demonstrated a complete ineptitude for the task at hand - THEY DON’T GO IN GOAL AGAIN!!!

Harlequins E played CoI E at the weekend in a rearranged fixture that was made necessary by half of the Quins V team playing in the (V) vets tournament the previous Sunday. It might have been better to play that game because we played quite well that weekend. Indeed we played incredibly well this weekend, unfortunately we were let down by a bit of inexperience in the goal keeping department. This was one of the best hockey matches I have played in with the 5ths. After going a goal up we looked to be cruising to a victory. We got a few short corners and although we didn’t get any shots we looked confident. The defence was also extremely vigilant and protective of their novice keeper. Tony Aherne, Denis Gallagher and Quinton Claassen played as if they were used to a much better level of attacking forwards (some of whom had not quite passed the embryonic stage to my aging eye) and demonstrated a confidence I had not really seen for our team for ages. The midfield was excellent linking up with the forwards and defending when they had to. Again this is not the kind of performance I have become accustomed to. The forwards were camped in the CoI half for long periods although they didn’t get many shots they got millions of short corners. So the reader might wonder how if we played so well how did the score get to be the way it got. Unfortunately. As team captain and with advice from others with more experience in the way to play this kind of game, I agreed to rearrange the match for the weekend of the bank holiday. There were some notable absentees due to prior commitments, the most striking of which, apart from Peter Payne, was our normal power-house of a goalkeeper Clive Brooks. We missed Clive’s expertise very much last weekend. He knows when to go for a ball and when not to. He knows that if you do make a diving save you need the ball to go out of play and how much you have to push it to make sure that it does. But most of all he knows which legs the pads go on and presumably he can see out of the helmet. (Although I am not so sure about that)...

I have to say that I will take most of the blame for the result at the weekend and if I could have fitted under my bed, I would still have been there now no matter what enticements that there were to get me out from my sanctuary. My only reservation is that we got loads of short corners in the game and didn’t test their keeper once. He could have been a crap as me, if he had to face a few shots, but he didn’t…have ANY! I always felt that we should practice short corners as a team and I am going to go to training on Tuesdays to try to initiate a bit of preparation for our upcoming matches, starting with the match next weekend against Waterford. I don’t particularly expect us to run around and get sweaty although this would not do us any harm either. I would just like to try a few ideas for short corners and other set pieces. If we do this for an hour a week this will be one hour more than we practice at the moment and it might even bring us some much needed points and give us more reason to work at our more standard training regime of bench pressing heavy glasses full of something that is at least as good for you as Horlicks. We might even beat them in the return leg, which would be a nice thing to do as well!! Please come back Clive we look forward to some state of the art keeping on Sunday.