Man of the Match, George Angel. Match Report, Sandipan Chanda

It was the first game after lockdown 2 and thanks to our fixture fairies we had a wonderful early start away at Royston. Could not have asked for a better combination of location and time for a fixture! So, the first thing on everyone's mind was whether Cormac would be awake early on a cold Saturday morning to inform us if the game had got called off. Joe was the first to start the enquiries but after a flurry of hopeful messages the game was still on. While all of the wonderful messages were being exchanged Matt lay in his warm bed and eventually turned up late (DoD candidate 1 but he did not write this report) and Xav's dad missed the alarm (DoD candidate 2 but he did not write this report).

We finally managed to get all 14 players warmed up (yes, we counted thrice just to check we had FOURTEEN!!!) and ready for the game to start with an orange ball (yes we tried to figure that one out too). The starting few minutes were a bit chaotic as the players were trying to remember how to play post lockdown hockey but slowly and steadily the 6s started to make things happen. Chris opened the scoring after his first shot was delayed and saved but then he somehow popped the rebound in. Thank god for that because a few minutes later the opposition managed to stitch together a few passes opening up our defence and somehow got one past our keeper Tom who had a really good game otherwise and was one of the MoM candidates.

In the meantime, Jonesy managed to aggravate someone enough that the opposition number 33 squared up to him only to find Jonesy on the floor...LAUGHING AT HIM! The angry number 33 was later spotted kicking and swearing off the pitch as he could not reconcile with the fact that Jonesy was on the floor not because of his clenched fist. Nice use of ROFL Jonesy!

Back to hockey...

After a wonderful half time team talk which basically could be summarised as "Can people stop passing right all the time" the 6s made a nice start to the 2nd half. Ben, Elliot and Xav made sure that they switched around to keep the pace up while George put in a man of the match performance as the right half. He was seen running past the opposition numerous times which kept the pressure in attack and helped Ben T, Ian and Jonty prevent any mistakes happening at the back.

Chris and Jonesy were doing their bit in midfield too, but all of their hard work was totally dismissed by Ben T (DoD condidate 3 but he did not write this report) who had a massive melt down at Chris and Jonesy for lack of holding the middle. We will never know what triggered that explosion! Ian was not spared either for not bollocking our opponents enough! Ian has promised to practice the art of bollocking before our next game so looking forward to some improvements there.

Stuart and Sandi (his awesome between the legs blind hits were on display... of course!) rotated up front with the former scoring the 2nd also from a short. The short came from a superbly quickly taken long corner by Ian (this information was kindly shared with the author of the report by Ian himself).

Just to re-confirm we had 14 players available and yes, the report talks about 12! The reason being, the last two were not seen in action at all for the whole 70 minutes. It was almost like Matt was still in his duvet and Joe was still checking with Cormac if the game was on (other than randomly turning up to inject the shorts).

After going 2-1 up the 6s made sure they did not give up the lead and saw the game off!

What happened next was a totally confusing round of voting where even after Sandi's unfair vote for Ben T, an unexplained turn of circumstances and change in numbers (some people have asked Sandi to bring a calculator next time) Sandi was voted DoD. He was last spotted after the game protesting outside Oaklands!

A really strong team performance by the 6s as they look to continue the wonderful restart with a win next game.