Last Tuesday our men’s first team travelled to Bournemouth to play the second leg of their games with the Bournemouth city’s team. In our team we had two newcomers that were chosen to play with us: Alex Horlock and Mitchel Clarke. Both of them, as well as others, have tried hard to prove themselves in the second team and so were given a chance to play with the first team. For Horlock, this was more than a game; the city blasted him with memories of ex-lovers and drunken incidents.

The game started with us attacking in the deep end, and as in every beginning of a game, the opposition was playing hard. However, we found opportunities to score by getting man ups and setting up properly; our boys managed to score 4 goals. Ben (goalie) was defending an enormous goal and managed to concede only two goals in the first quarter. The final score at the end of the quarter was 2-4 with the big Stags leading.

In the next quarter, our team was defending the deep end which was equipped with a tiny goal. Good defending led to no goals being scored by the B’mouth team while nice shots on the big shallow-end goal endowed us 3 goals. This gave to us a 5 goals advantage; the score was 2-7 for the Spitfires.

The other half of the game followed roughly the same pattern; two goals were conceded while defending the shallow end and 1 in the deep end; leading to the final goal total for the Bournemouth team of 5 goals. Our boys managed to be constantly driving to create space in the pit, get multiple majors, shoot on target and win man ups. This led to 2 goals being scored in the deep end and 3 goals being scored in the shallow end. The final score was a 5-12 win for the Soton team.

One of the highlights of the night was Will Divall’s one-on-one chance. He broke away and managed to be by himself two metres away from the opposition’s goalie with no defender in a 5 metres radius. Will had the chance to think a way to score a glorious goal and decided to lob the goalie. But lady luck and the right post said no to him. Two big highlights of the night came from two big sailors, Alex Horlock and Tim Walton. Alex, coming from the second team had only trained with the first team a little but still managed to try one of the man-up moves he learned. He received a pass and nailed the ball into the upper right corner; a very good start in his welcoming game with the first team. Tim surprised everyone once again by scoring another one-on-one and two more goals.

New players have integrated in the team nicely and wins have been stacking up for our team throughout the whole year. The team’s aim is now to take second team players to start training with the first team as next year many 1st team players will be leaving. One of our most serious games against Southampton city is coming up.

Scorers:
3 – Tim Walton
3 – Nick Xenakis
3 – Panos Logothetis
1 – Alex Horlock
1 – Will Divall
1 – Will Logothetis