Contribution from Ladies 1s player Heather Offord
Confusion swept through the team as a double header weekend meant TWO different shirts for TWO different games – and some of us just couldn’t get our heads around it. Shirts were a shambles, two with numbers stuck on, 2 from a different club, and one outstanding attempt to draw on the Wayfarers logo onto a t-shirt purchased from Tesco’s moments before.
As brilliant as our resourcefulness was, unfortunately this lack of sharpness seeped into the first half of the game. Moments of great play were shortly followed by Banbury having the ball again. We just couldn’t keep hold of it! Sometimes in these situations the best thing that can happen is to go 1-0 down….so maybe we did it on purpose? But low and behold we’re losing, and we start stringing passes together again. After some scrappy play in the D the underrated Kate Seaborne made sure we closed out the half neck and neck, keeping her goal to game ratio higher than our Coach would like to admit.
“You can’t play a lot worse than that” was a very appropriate half time talk from coach Joe Oddy, and we all nodded in agreement that the 2nd half would be a new game.
We half lived up to it. We certainly improved but there were still some heart in the mouth moments to keep us in check, namely our sturdy goalie, JP, letting a shot “go wide” before watching it bounce off the post and then pulling out an unbelievable save to stop the incoming rebound.
Lizzie Leith’s moment of brilliance secured our second goal as she perfectly executed the classic “dummy” to literally walk the ball into the goal, as a solo effort from a short corner. 2-1 London Wayfarers.
A soft sending off of one of our most passionate strikers, Nikki Mollison, but unexpectedly Fran Low stepped up to the mark and made sure people knew that centre backs make decent forwards too!
All in all, a tough day at the office, but if you can turn up half dressed and you can win when you’re not playing well then you know you’ve got something special going on.
A very well deserved MoM to a solid left back Holly Turner, and just as well deserved TFC to Katie Potter for designing her own shirt.