Last Sunday, the men’s first team went to Basingstoke, to play a Hampshire league game against the region’s U-19 team. It was exciting for the team to play its first game in a double deep pool.

The first quarter, as well as the rest of the game, was full of mistakes from both teams and odd (possibly biased) decisions. The teenagers were playing quite sensibly in attack and defence. They managed to score two goals by stealing the ball and scoring a man up. During our attacks, people were driving and they were creating spaces to shoot or put the ball in the pit. But poor efforts from the arc and the pit led to only 3 goals being scored. The score at the end of the quarter was 3-2 with the Stags leading.

After having a quick team talk, people’s feelings that the referee’s decisions were slightly biased were verified. We were constantly being awarded majors for simple fouling, or no fouling, while at the same time getting a major awarded to our side seemed impossible. At the end of the game, our team had been awarded 14 major fouls while the opposition only 3. As a team we don’t look for excuses, we always try to deal with the situation the best way we can and that is what we did. Congratulations to Tim, as well as Ben for receiving no majors and to Nick Tankov for receiving 3 exclusions.

So the game continued with the same pattern and us scoring two goals, one from the pit and one with a shot from the arc. But both goals found a response, which came in the form of two successful counter attacks from the U-19s. The score at the end of the second quarter was 5-4 for our team.

The second half of the game commenced with the Soton lads playing very effective defences and managing to keep the majors to a minimum; this way only one goal was conceded during the third quarter. By completing many steals, moving the ball around the arc and driving effectively we managed to score four goals. The score at the end of the third quarter was 9-5.

The last quarter was the busiest for the referee and the table as one exclusion was coming after the other. Funnily, our team managed to get a double man down, thus playing temporarily with two 5 players in the pool. Also, this was the quarter that Will Divall with a kick/push to a player of the opposition, allegedly, misplaced his hip. A trolley and a thermal blanket quickly escalated the dramatisation factor to 100%. Back to the scoring action, our team scored another three goals while also conceding the same amount. The final score of the game was 12-8 with the Southampton team being on the winning side.

Our minibus driver for the night was Ben Kingsley, who completed his first journey driving the team around, big thank you. Ben’s awfully loud and disturbing (just exaggerating) GPS – or Tom Tom for the Brits – giving him directions made us appreciate Mini, who just uses the co-driver’s help for that. I would like to give a tremendously big thank you to Mini who has been driving the club around for more than 3 years.

Scorers:
4 – Panos Logothetis
3 –Will Logothetis
2 – Tim Walton
1 – Henry Perkins
1 – Josh Rowland
1 – Michael Stephanou