A hard fought point

On Saturday Reigate Priory Ladies 1s hosted Merton in the third league game of the season. It wasn't the best start to the match when Ange induced sounds of child birth from Jane by smashing a ball onto her foot during the warm up.

Thankfully it wasn't too serious and after recovering in the dug-out Jane made it on to the pitch towards the end of the first half and produced some brilliant attacking hockey up the right-hand side of the pitch. The game was all Reigate’s for the first 10 minutes with some fantastic attacking play from Laura and Tiger.

Unfortunately Merton broke on the counterattack to score the first goal against the run of play. Within seconds Reigate responded as Laura helped to set Stacey up to rocket the ball from the top of the semi-circle into the back of the net leaving the goalkeeper looking shocked at what had just happened. After the equaliser the first half dissolved into a hard slog: Izzy took a battering at the back, Cat kept the team in it with some superb keeping and Kate made excellent ground up the left but Reigate kept getting turned over and making it hard for themselves.

After a hard team talk from Sally at half time we noticed that the other umpire was giving the team talk at the other end of the pitch: this went some way to explaining some of the odd umpiring decisions in the second half.

The most surprising umpiring decision was when Lucy had a yellow card brandished at her for what looked like a good, hard tackle. Throughout the second half Cat earned her “man of the match” with some stalwart keeping and the inners ran themselves ragged. Rach took her turn at defending and her goalkeeping skills came to the rescue as she nonchalantly batted a ball off the line from a Merton shortcorner.

Despite Reigate’s best defending efforts Merton managed to take the lead again. All was not lost though as Kate proved too skillful for the Merton defenders and earned a penalty flick which Stacey calmly slotted away. Reigate continued to battle against Merton and managed to maintain their undefeated run this season with the final score at 2-2.