After having a fully loaded 10 days of water polo and playing at the U-Polo finals, our men’s 1st team got on the road to Basingstoke. Although the trip was short, Mr Divall decided to tell us a big truth about his surname: the truth is that his name is pronounced Divall not Divall (;-P). Just kidding, to pronounce his name correctly you need to put the emphasis on the “i” and the first part of his name (“Div-”) sounds like “dive”.
Enough with the grammar lessons, this game was one of the oddest games for our team, with both extremely great and poor performances in the quarters. To this greatly contributed the refereeing that in some moments was simply strange.

The first half was easily won by our team, as we managed to score 4 goals and only concede 1. Joining us for the first time was Paul Heerema who had the opportunity to score his first goal in this quarter by receiving a deflected shot. The score at the end of the quarter was 4-1 with the Soton Spitfires leading.

In the second half of the game, our team ended up being split into an attacking and a defending part. We were managing to steal the ball so quickly that we always had to counter. In the second quarter we managed to score 6 goals but conceded 3, as our defence at some small intervals was lacking its normal consistency. The score at the end of the first half was 10-4 with the Stags leading.

The third quarter was a disgrace with our team conceding 5 goals and scoring only 2. During this quarter our team was too relaxed with the 6 goals lead that we had managed to build in the first half. The score at the end of the third quarter was 12-9.

The third quarter was a wake up call for the team, which reminded us that we have to be play hard right until the end of the game. So in the last quarter we entered stronger and more efficient than ever. This translated into 7 goals being scored from our team and only 2 from the Basingstoke team. The final score was a 19-11 win for our team.

Although this game had relatively small number of players getting majors (only 5 people in total), Nick Tankov and Josh Rowland (Lefty) felt that the game was lacking the extra difficulty and pinch of danger. To counter that, both of them decided to get wrapped up (get three majors) and walk away from the game early. In other news, Robin has managed to play a very nicely in the last few games and will be the first team goalie from now on.

A big Thank You to Amy for travelling all the way to Basingstoke with us to referee the game. A few more games are coming up for all of our club teams, try to stay updated.

Scorers:
5 – Tim Walton
4 – Panos Logothetis
3 – Nick Xenakis
3 – Will Logothetis
2 – Will Divall
1 – Paul Heerema, Josh Rowland

Majors:
3 – Nick Tankov
3 – Josh Rowland
1 – Tim Walton, Will Logothetis, , Owen Stephens