The Walking Wounded

There are some games in hockey where nothing goes right. Kettering 4's experienced their heaviest defeat of the season against City of Peterborough 7's. The week leading up to the match didn't go well, availability issues higher up the men's section and availability issues within the 4's squad meant that we were scratching around to get an 11 together let alone having somes subs. However in the end, a couple of players changed their plans and 13 luckless players travelled to the bright lights of Peterborough. Stuart Mitchell was making his second start of the season and young MD jacobs made his first appearance in the league from the U14's team.

Careful examination of recent results of CoP 7's showed that since their 11-0 drubbing against our own 3rd team they had picked up a couple of narrow wins against Ely 3's and Cambridge South 5's. teams that we had also had good results against. No great cause for concern other than we needed to prepare in the same way and be competitive on the field and play the hockey we knew we were capable of.
From the pushback the match didn't follow the script described. CoP proceded to apply pressure and batter the beleagued 4's with their strong midfiled play and forceful skillful forward line. 4's hardly got a sniff of the ball for the first 5 minutes let alone put a stick on it. A short corner was forced after a foot infringrement by the skipper in the D. The ball was put in with pace rarely seen at our level, the skipper running 1 got close to the player doing the striking but not close enough to get in the tackle. Bang! the ball ricocheted off his shin guard causing a bruise giving away another short. In a carbon copy, the penalty corner was taken but this time the ball struck the skipper flush on the knee causing them to go off to recover. Injured party #1.
CoP were relentless pushing forward orchestrated by a couple of excellent midfielders to which the kettering defence had few answers. Despite numerous changes in position, shuffling the subs, giving the umpires lessons in measurement and a few sporadic and ultimately futile breaks by Lee and Finn, the inevitable happened the opposition put the ball in the back of the net. CoP scored with ease and when the half time whistle went Kettering were 3 nil down and struggling for inspiration.

At half time, the team was a bit shellshocked. The usual defensive plan of picking out the dangerous player and marking them out of the gae was difficult to put into practise with 5 or 6 players from the opposition able to break through the defence with pace. The score line was only kept managable by Tim Plevin at right back playing his game of the season putting in very timely tackles and trying to set up the few chance that came Kettering way.

The second half started at a more leisurely pace with Peterborough substitutung their influential midfilder in the No2 shirt. This gave the space for Kettering to gain a foothold into the game and launch an attack of their own. Finally a shirt corner was won and using a well rehearsed short corner routine, Tony Heath received the ball at the top of the D and fired it back to the left of the goal for Lee Paris to swoop and deflect it into the goal beating the stunned keeper. A rare moment of quality hockey from 4's.

This was soon followed up with some more quality hockey. The CoP attack was broken down and a quick ball out of defence found it's way to Finn, who lit the afterburners beat the defence and screamed into the opposition D. he then promptly shot the ball past the diving keeper from the right hand side. 3-2 and for a few moment hope surged through the Kettering team.

Realising their mistake, CoP substituted "No2" back into midfield closing the gaping hole intheir midfield. He immediately added some urgency in their play and normal service resumed and Kettering were forced back into some desperate defence. Cambridge scored again through a lesson of simple passing hokey that wrong footed the defence creating the space required to slot the ball home to restore a two goal cushion. The pressure was now unrelenting and their next attack resulted in Tim going down like he'd been shot by a sniper. His hamstring popped whilst stretching to make another tackle on their left winger.

The 4's saw out the remainder of the game in valiant defence and manged to limit the now rampant peterborugh players to only two further goals. To some relief the team dragged themselves off of the pitch knowing that they had surprisingly had the hardest game of the season. Certainly this was not the same side that had suffered a 11-0 defeat not a month before.

When asked about this, the opposition Captain, just said that it was the best they had played and they had just "clicked" though certainly having a player or two that had played in their 3rd team last year certainly would help.

If they keep the team together for the rest of the season then Peterborogh will have a definite say in who wins the league this year and the current title aspirants will need to be wary.

Next week sees St Ives 4 coming to the Bishop Pitch. 4's are wanting to bounce back quickly after this defeat and also redress some of the balance from last year when St Ives put 29 goals past them in the two fixtures.