Wednesday Evening saw the Men’s summer league make the drive over to Bath to play City of Bath Cobwebs. Arriving seemingly in the middle of no-where we were greeted by a good pitch and just in time to see Shaun disappear off to try to find some shorts! A typical message from Tom Broome said he would be arriving at some point during the game.

The warm up seemed to show that we could remember how to hold a stick and a glance at the opposition showed that they had a couple of young players along with some very “experienced” support. The game started well and we stuck to our game plan well, controlling the speed of play and using good crisp passes to keep possession, it wasn’t long before this got us all the way up the pitch and Lewis Francuz managed to put one round the keeper and take the lead. We kept the play moving in the right direction and when Colin Ainsworth took his first break of the match after coming back from surgery we decided to revert to 3 at the back and an extra player up front. This helped us to keep our form and control the ball a bit further up the field, resulting in another goal coming for us through Jack Colling. The arrival of Shaun and Tom meant we could we could rotate our players well, especially those who were doing a lot of running. We had a couple of short corners, but a good save by the keeper from Lewis’ drag flick and Adam Howard completely missing the ball on his shot failed to net us any benefit. We were however slightly caught out at the back when Bath broke forwards and left our two holding midfielders a little high resulting in a half time scoreline of 2-1.

The second half continued in the same way and we moved the ball well again to push right up and moved the ball into a lot of space down the wings. This gave us several chances and Lewis converted one for his second of the match. We continued to apply the pressure and got our reward, seeing a flurry of stick tackles and repeated shots, mainly by Harry Croker straight at the prone keepers pads before Shaun piled through, took the ball and rattled it against the back board to put us 4-1 up. We then seemed to relax a little, or maybe we were just getting tired as the game spread more and opportunities appeared at each end. Bath scored after a good break and then found a free player in the D to slot some. Within quite a short time they were back on the attack and a one on one appeared. Captain Rob O’Neill ensured they didn’t score, but sliding out and taking out the player! Bath did however neatly tuck away the resulting penalty flick. Despite us having the lion’s share of the rest of the game in Bath’s D we couldn’t get any more goals and came away with a deserved 4-3 win leaving us 3rd in the summer league at the moment. The bath players commented on how well our 3 young players did in the game, Jack, Dan D and Dan K, Well done!

The ladies summer league were the nominal home side in their game against Clevedon Ladies at Clevedon School. We have a team made predominantly from our 2s and looking towards the future and it showed when playing against a Clevedon team which is made from their only team and therefore their 1s. Clevedon moved the ball well and drove round the back of our D well to give themselves the space to pull the ball back to free players waiting further out in the D giving them opportunities to finish well, which they did repeatedly leading to an 8-0 win for Clevedon.