Abbey National, 28th October 2004 Match Report

3-0 lost

Team : Chris, Gordon, Roger, Bruce, Ashley, Nigel, Nishi, Marc and Sara (who was meant to play)

Firstly thanks to Sara again for doing the "paperwork", we really need to find someone to take on this role to allow Sara to play once in a while!!

Unbelievably Steve Smith who starting coming to practice a few weeks ago happened to mention before the game that he had just passed his refereeing course, so he was hastily installed as match referee for the night otherwise we would have struggled again with the refs duties.

Thanks to Sophie for doing 2nd refs duties and dealing with a couple of dodgy moments. Let's hope Steve can help us out more in the future.

As for the match, we came up against a higher quality team than we have been used to, but we played very well, in the first 2 sets we took them very close, only just losing by a few points each time. The last set didn't go too well with a few of us going through a bit of a bad patch, by mid set we were quite a few points down so we had a time-out, at this point I would like to thank Nishi (a young fit lad) for refusing to come on and substitute for me (a well knackered 44 year old!!!). Amazingly we nearly pulled off a miracle and closed the gap to within a few points with some hard grafting, only to lose it on a fluky shot. Another solid team performance with some positive points to carry forward to the next game.

Next match is on Sat 6th Nov at 16.00 away to Hatfield, then Thurs 11th at home to Phoenix

Chris.