Womens Premier vs. Waikanae at Jim Cooke – 11.5.08

Written by Matt Dillon

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

Womens Premier vs. Waikanae at Jim Cooke – 11.5.08 Waikanae haven’t won a game all season. BNU have won three in this new fangled premier division and are convinced they’re going to win the league…in a nutshell, Brooklyn should win and win well…if only things always went as they should. In the first instance, we had made a slight oversight vis a vis the colour of our strip in comparison to Waikanae’s. We play in a stylish black with red trim, Waikanae play in what can only be described as a garish shade of black with a vulgar, too-bright red trim…apparently they were just too similar. Despite our best efforts to convince them that it made both fiscal and sporting sense to let us play in our strip and for them to play in their alternate strip this was a no go. Luckily Waikanae helped us out - Picture then, if you can, this…bright red, enormous, silky shorts, paired with calf-poo yellow socks (some up to the crutch, others just over the shinpad), and finished off with a white shirt that had lightening bolts of not just red, but red and orange (in the same bolt!) coming down over the shoulder. Furthermore, they didn’t quite have enough of these (I can see why someone would pinch one…) so we were also provided with a lovely tennis shirt, a tight white t-shirt, and poor old Jo had to wear my old man white singlet that was closer to crème than white and had arm holes down to her waist…Anyhoo, obviously it’s not a fashion show, so after a bit of a laugh BNU, Old Man Jo, and Anja Kournikova took to the field ready for action. We were certainly positive in our play after the opening whistle. We made at least three quality passes before we started to play like a bunch of flowers that Mal Meninga would definitely have referred to as pansies. For some reason, we decided twenty six passes to gain five metres was a good way to make ground…as it happens, it wasn’t. Add to this the fact that everyone’s first touch appeared to be their first touch EVER and you can begin to get a picture of what we were up against - ourselves. All the while Waikanae ran enthusiastically and received a wealth of possession as a result of our determined efforts to give it away. So while Waikanae were asking just that, Bronwyn was left asking Wai kan’t I do anything right! Admittedly she wasn’t alone…Cat in fact admitted that she too was shite, and who am I to disagree…considering our abysmal effort (with the wind) we were lucky to be going into half time at 0-0…except that with a minute to go we again gifted the Waikanae team the ball by trying to dribble and pass across the eighteen yard box and one of the only two players in their team that could kick fluked an absolute beauty over Niki’s head and into the far right hand corner of the net. The half time talk didn’t seem that inviting at this point. Funnily enough John wasn’t overly impressed with our play thus far…he said lots of constructive things but overall he just said were crap. He did also manage to squeeze into the talk that we could win this game provided we actually start playing football, instead of the tiddleywink pinball style we’d been employing thus far. So that’s what we decided to do. Right from the whistle our play was markedly improved…in fact Cat ‘not-usually-on-after-half-time’ Redfearn stole the ball from the kick off and only narrowly missed scoring after a blistering solo run…apparently it was the brightness of the keepers jersey that was her undoing…I would argue that the fact that she kicked it straight to the keeper at about 5km per hour may have had something to do with it, but we can beg to differ. We didn’t look back after this, thank god, cause the number of back passes we did in the first half had me convinced we all thought we were going the opposite way (as did another run Cat made towards our goal down the right hand flank…). We scored early on in the half thanks to some deft touches from the midfield and a nice finish from Noel (only her E has those two little dots on it so in case you were wondering she doesn’t have a mans name…). I have an uncanny tendency to forget the intricate details of any second half and this appears to have happened again…suffice to say, Noel must have thought it was Christmas as she scored two more times to get a hat-trick, and Bronwyn actually did a couple of quite productive things. Final score then, 3-1 to the mighty Brooklyn. We made it difficult for ourselves and really need to get on top of this for our games against the other quality teams in our division. As it happens, our win did take us to the top of the table so at least for now we are winning the league! Feel free to come and watch a goal fest (not that we’re getting ahead of ourselves again…) at Fraser Park on Sunday at 1.00pm. Another sparkling match report to you by fashion icon the Knockout.