Friendly against South Glos

In true Knowle style a core of 9 players lined up to face the imposing opposition.  South Glos arrived 45 minutes early fully equipped with goalkeeper, 2 umpires and a momentous warm up in the driving rain.  We tried to ready the pitch, acrobatic Ally hoiked the nets from the pulleys by climbing up a slippery post 12 feet up.  Then we cleared a few interesting items and discussed tactics for the match.

We stood strong in our classic formation and vowed to not let them past our 22.  Well it worked for most of the first half.  Paige turned up, after warming up by falling down some stairs, and we increased to 10 players on pitch – wahoo!

Our hard work was awarded with a few penalty corners, but we didn’t convert our chances.  Narrowly missing by hitting the goal posts a fair few times.  Grr.  Then it started raining properly, a few of us suffered at the hands of the stick of doom but we hobbled and limped on.   Eventually they made it into our D, got a short and to be honest I can’t remember the details but they scored.  Meh.

The half-time team talk with Kelly discussed our options including actually passing the ball back, like we have been in training.  Well okay, we’ll try it.

The second half started well with us keeping hold of the ball and expertly passing it backwards – yes backwards!  We stormed down into their half and blasted the ball into their D and continued to miss in some spectacular style.  But we didn’t stop trying.  Dynamo Fran motored down the right hand side of the pitch, then found another gear, then another and smashed the ball into the D, their goalie lifted her foot and let the ball roll past and a super sneaky Dave popped it into the back of the net.   Superb equaliser witnessed by our coach – yipee.

The fabulous passing continued, we kept pressing hard and somehow played with more numbers than them in their 22.  Then play stopped, Ally had been hit and it looked like she was practising for Halloween by bleeding all over the pitch from her lip.   She rushed off to MIU (missing out on all the awesome cakes ☹) and as there were only a couple of minutes left we called it a day.

So in summary we got soaked in the rain and suffered some injuries but we should be really proud of our good performance with only 10 players.  Keep it up Knowlies.

Post match: 2 of our players had showers before teas.

Fran overwhelmingly won man of the match with 60% of the votes.

And the cakes were amazing.  So sorry you missed them Ally.