Mens 5 vs Old Cranleighan Samurai

Evening gents. Clear your diaries, it’s match report time!

Well, colour me in purple, take a couple of cheeky Polaroids, and send them to your nan as a birthday present, what a performance that was.

A literally perfect example of playing the game and not the occasion, that was as good an illustration of mistake-free, maximum effort, professional get-the-job-done hockey as I’ve ever seen. It was like a really efficient trip to Sainsbury’s: 70 non-stop minutes of parking in someone else’s spot, grabbing everything we wanted from the game plan shopping list before they could get their hands on it, and mopping up anything loose that fell out the trolley in Aisle 3. It’s hard to know where to start really.

Helped by lovely conditions (if a bit blindingly sunny), a decent pitch, and a very strong side, we got out of the blocks pretty well. True, much of the play in the first ten minutes was in our half, but we controlled possession. A couple of really quite marginal calls gave OCs two short corners in quick succession, but that was the only real threat of the first half. In fact great running from James, Tom and Matt throughout the game meant they only got one shot off from four or five shorts.

As the game went on we grew in confidence and started to assert ourselves more and more. A mixture of genuinely incredible work rate - especially from the midfield and halves - strong, accurate passing, and some great leads up top, gave us the advantage both going forward and in defence. Their skip said to me afterwards that he thought we’d completely out-classed them. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, because I know how hard we all had to work for that result, but we did look very comfortable at times. And I think at 2-0 the fight went out of them a little bit, given that they hadn’t really had any shots by that point.

The game ebbed and flowed, to be sure; there were times when we were under pressure and were forced to clear our lines. But equally there were times when we had them completely pinned down, and we looked more dangerous than they did in those positions. Plus in the last quarter of an hour as they pushed forward looking for a goal we were able to break play down time and time again, and be virtually one-on-one with their keeper. I think I only touched the ball a very small handful of times in the second half, we were so solid at cutting off anything they tried to build up.

We did well to keep our heads, too. One or two of their players were getting a bit overexcited, and the umpires weren’t the best we’ve seen this season. Scotty got a green, our first of the season (which tells you how brilliantly disciplined we’ve been) and so did one of theirs. I thought we did well to keep ourselves grounded and focused. The stakes are high - I get it.

Anyway, just to give you a bit of context for this win: before this game OCs had played 16, won 14, drawn 1 and lost 1, and had only conceded 10 goals in 16 games. We’ve now scored 5 goals of the 13 they’ve conceded, meaning all the other teams in the league have only managed 8 between them all season. At the other end, they’d scored 65 goals coming into the game. This was only the third time all year they’d drawn a blank. Absolute credit to everyone who played - you just dominated the team that was expected to walk away with the title

Spike: busy-ish first half with a bit of kicking and a short corner to deal with, but not much beyond that, other than a John Smith’s style “‘av it!” boot halfway through the second half. Really enjoyed the fact they hardly got in our D. At all.

Tom: I want to find a better word than “solid” to describe Tom’s game because that assumes it was a kind of run-of-the-mill prosaic performance when actually there was much more to it than that. I think maybe the phrase I’m looking for is that Tom had “a Bish” of a game. Despite having the age and dimensions of the Telecom Tower, Nickels actually got up and down the wing tremendously well, and like everyone else his man-marking, tackling and 50-50 winning was simply awesome. We were rock solid at the back for 97% of this game, and Tom’s flexibility to play there was a huge part of that.

Maj: it’s Ramadan, the only time of the year you associate Maj with the word “fast”, but the lad made the most of his game time. A typically selfless performance: strong in the tackle, showing good awareness, offering plenty of space for switches, and making a nuisance of himself, even more than normal. Maj is difficult to get past, anchoring the defence ably, adding another bulwark to a really strong defensive line. He even got a non-ironic MoM nomination! I know!

Rob: a performance which pretty much distilled everything the Pringulator has brought to the team this year. Flat-stick passing, the quality of which you’d expect to see at a much higher level of hockey; marking - both of players and of space - which evidences a surprisingly good hockey brain; and a calm, thoughtful and serious presence which balances some of the more - how can I put it? - emotional elements in the team. No comedy tumbles from Mr P this time, just 100% focus making things zero fun for the OCs forwards, and bringing home our 10th clean sheet of the season. I even overheard someone using the expression “ginger ninja”. I know!

Dave F: playing a back four allowed us to keep a man spare to pick up loose balls, make progress up the middle of the park, and help cover oppo attacks. Most of the time it was Farmer doing these things. It was also really pleasing to see OCs getting no breakaways down the middle at all in this game after what happened last time. Like everyone else, Dave marked tightly, sensibly and relentlessly, and gave the oppo really no space to create anything at all. The future Earl of Farmington also directed the back four really well - sometimes we don’t appreciate how hard it is to keep that level of concentration up for 70+ minutes, so it’s extra impressive that Dave only got into three fights.

Jack: gonna give this lad full marks for workrate, positivity and his general getting in amongst it attitude. I love the fact that Mr A is literally a Jack of all trades: he doesn’t mind bringing both his powerdrill and his scalpel to the match, by which I mean he can be at the same time either a finesse player or a Jackhammer. He worked super hard out there on the wing against a pretty decent midfield and defence, providing a really nice win-then-create tandem with the interior of our midfield. Hard to knock off the ball, and hard to stop when on the run, Jack has been an absolutely key player in our recent run. If he could have arrived 0.5 seconds earlier at that far post he could have bagged a hat-trick too.

Alex: I could start this paragraph in exactly the same way as I did Jack’s, because the boy Scotty brought both barrels to this game as well. We often think of him as a slinky, slalomy, creative forward - and that’s definitely true - but he’s actually also a Rottweiler of a ball winner who does put the hard yards in. When we were occasionally on the backfoot he did his fair share of marking and tackling, and he has some mad stick skills to do it well, too. But as we see week after week it is, of course, his trademarked mazy runs which continue to give us a big advantage over whoever we play. It got to a stage where OCs were just dropping off him and letting him run at them, because they simply couldn’t get the ball off him. Big mistake: let Alex in the D and you will experience things that are worse than the organisation of OCs catering.

Rich: very close to getting a RichLee deserved man of the match award, this chap was just everywhere. And apart from making life hugely difficult for the OC backline, boxing them in across multiple areas of the pitch, running his absolute posterior off, and making himself available for 16s, cross-field passes, and short drop-offs, his superhuman workrate also crucially allowed the rest of the midfield to find space and pick out through-balls. On top of that, his legs occupied defenders so much our front two could make positive leads in between and behind them. It’s such an advantage having Rich in that role it cannot be overstated, and it really wore OCs down. Outstanding moment for me was the face-down, knee-splitting, prostrate tackle which destroyed an OC on the edge of our D. If they ever remake “The Commitments” it will just be a montage of Rich throwing himself around a hockey pitch.

James: his turn to play the Swiss army knife role this week, and he absolutely delivered. James has the stick skills and body control to win and then keep possession both in defence and attack, and he gave us some real quality when hugging our LH touchline. We were so good at picking 50-50 balls today, and I’d wager a decent percentage of those were won by the boy Sunderland. Turning into one of our absolutely key players, James has the legs, the skillz and the smarts to become a really good player. Well, I say smarts: the lad is from Hampshire and hadn’t heard of the New Forest. So maybe just hockey smarts.

Dave W: quality showing from the Webster-ster. When you talk about putting pressure on a defence, stifling play, and weaving a Web to force players into making quick decisions and mistakes, this is the kind of performance you want to look at. Dave also got into some fab positions around the D, opening up gaps and stretching play. Not every lay-off came off, but the general link up play and lead-running was mint.

Matt: full-throttle display from Junior, and you could tell he was well up for it from his first touch. Really good commitment chasing down defenders, some sublime long passes into the D that we couldn’t quite take advantage of, and a couple of lovely goals, this was a game-winning performance from Matt. Elegant when running with the ball in a kind of cartoon ostrich way, he looked determined and hungry all game. So it was a shame when the pie and chips never showed up. Plenty of MoM shouts, and rightly so.

Lawrence: absolutely outstanding performance up top from the man who should have been hunting game on safari but who had to make do with spanking some Old Cranleighans instead. I thought Lozza was immense out there. He hassled the defenders like an annoyingly determined chugger cornering defenceless shoppers coming out of Greggs. He chased balls down, threaded some lovely passes, beat players, hit the byline, and scored a genuinely important opening goal. If it’s any consolation for the missed trip to SA, I thought his performance had a kind of majestic gazelle-type quality to it. Also in MoM connection.

Dave D: when I’m old and I look back at this game I’ll realise that it was actually won in the first 20 minutes when DD started absolutely bossing the midfield. Even though it was still 0-0, once Dave got on the ball OCs just couldn’t get it off him. He protects it like it’s a baby koala that’s just fallen out a tree; he takes his time to wait for options to develop; and he always chooses the right one. The play went left and right, back and forth, to white shirts and straight back, and each time the passes were crisp and accurate. OCs didn’t have anyone on their team who could match this over the 70 minutes, and apart from that abortion of a kit, this was an otherwise peerless display. Therefore, *MoM* goes once again to The Dunker.

I allowed myself a couple of minutes after the game to really savour this one. Not just because of the result and what it means for our season’s progress, but mainly because it was just a really high quality performance. We’ve got better and better as the season’s gone on; we’ve got a core of players who are now available pretty much every week; we’ve definitely grown as a team; and we’re winning games we deserve to win - comfortably. It’s been really amazing to watch over the last six or seven months, and it was only the cold and lack of chips which brought me back down to Earth.

But forget all that: the job remains unfinished. We have three games left and we need nine points to go up. Our GD is still the best in the league; our goals scored is the best in the league; and we have put together the longest winning run in the league, now nine games in a row without dropping points. We can absolutely do this but it’s going to require the same again until April 5th.

So please make yourselves available for the remaining fixtures (all of them!), get locked in, and stay fit. Farmer made a good point after the match that quite a lot of what we’re doing at training is coming off in games, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been improving and have been able to put together this run. So do try and come along.

We’re at home next week v Merton 2s in a huge winner-takes-all rematch. They’re now the only team we haven’t beaten, so get yourselves signed up, get yourselves revved up, and let’s smash them right up the Merton.

Spike