Mens 1st Team
Matches
Sat 18 Mar 2023  ·  Yorkshire & North East Men's Division 1
Leeds Adel 2
3
4
Durham City Hockey Club
Mens 1st Team
Leeds Adel M2s 3 - 4 Durham City M1s

Leeds Adel M2s 3 - 4 Durham City M1s

Matthew Kettley19 Mar 2023 - 21:34
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https://www.durhamcityhockey.c

An absolute thriller in the last away game of the season

It was a great day for the neutrals this Saturday as our last away game of the season saw us beat Leeds Adel 2s in a 3-4 thriller. A huge crowd witnessed the drama and they were not just Adel fans: Matt Kettley bought a fan-club and John, unavailable after fracturing his finger during his debut last week, drove down to watch. Now that is commitment.

The events preceding the game were unnerving. Could Adel be another team who amateurishly dabble in psychological warfare? They can’t help the bizarre drive to their pitch, which takes one through winding backroads, steep hills, and tight bends, until the oddly lovely village of Adel appears from nowhere, but its strangeness typified their hockey club. Duncan received the incorrect code for the changing rooms. Perhaps this misinformation (or disinformation?) was an attempt at kindness, as the changing room was by far the worst of the year. It even topped Shallam’s hovel. A quick search revealed that our changing room was not the only one with a sizeable puddle stretching across the floor; they all had one. It also smelt funny. A sign on the wall read ‘PLEASE LIMIT YOUR TIME SPENT IN THIS ROOM.’ We did not need this encouragement. We were very eager to get onto the pitch to both escape the oppressive pavilion and to redeem ourselves against a flailing team who beat us 0-3 only a few weeks ago in one of our worst performances for years.

The first-half saw us mostly at our very best. Within two minutes, Rob Thomlinson had walked through their entire defence and buried a shot in the goal from the left shoulder of the ‘D.’ Sadly, Mandy missed it. 0-1. We quickly scored again, but this time, Matt Kettley took the honours and began what turned out to be a hat-trick. 0-2. Adel rallied slightly. Their attacks, including a one-on-one with the keeper, were repelled. From a ’16, some passes along the back were like a pendulum and had Adel mesmerised. Eventually, Duncan smashed the ball up the line for Matt. Our captain dribbled past his defenders to the left baseline and unleashed a reverse-stick shot that somehow found the opposite side-netting. 0-3! We were all probably thinking about how many we were going to score. Our laxity was a mistake. We lost focus. Adel took full advantage of our sloppiness and increased the pressure. For a few minutes, we were unable to escape our ’23. Adel’s pressure resulted in a goal: a foul outside the ’D’ was taken quickly and a forward had an abundance of time to pick his spot. 1-3.

We managed to grind out the rest of the half and gave ourselves the hairdryer treatment at half-time. For much of the second-half, we failed to listen to ourselves. The only advice we took onboard was to stop appealing and just talking in general, for our status as an opposition team playing away precludes us from certain privileges. An Adel attack after only a few minutes saw them awarded a flick. 2-3. They soon scored again. It was a terrible drag-flick from a short-corner that went straight through Matt Coe. 3-3. The Adel crowd were hooting and hollering. This situation had the potential to be very embarrassing. It took us a while to, in the words of Alan Partridge, bounce back, but we defended resolutely and maintained parity. Little by little, we played our way back into the game and re-established our dominance. Some Adel mindlessness allowed the defence to play the ball straight through to an unmarked Matt Kettley who deftly completed his hat-trick. 3-4. It was time to kill the game. Adel did manage some forays forward, but even a series of short-corners after the final whistle couldn’t see them equalise. We celebrated on the pitch like we’d just won the league. The teas brought us back down to earth. They were so awful they do not deserve time or effort put into describing them, as no time or effort was spent preparing them. Adel should be grateful Anth was absent.

There was a photographer at the game. His pictures should be uploaded onto https://www.facebook.com/stevebiltcliffephotography quite soon, so if you’d like to see us in action, please give them a look. As a world exclusive, however, please click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X5o_4nUt38 if you’d like to see footage of Timmy explaining to the umpires that it was he, not the falsely accused Chris Hepworth, who was, apparently, giving the umpires so much grief.

Speaking of seeing us in action, our final game of the season is the coming Saturday at the unusually delightful time of 12:30 at MC, so, if you can, please come along to support us against rivals in both league position and geographical location Whitley Bay. It should be a cracker.

MoM: draw between Matts Kettley and Coe. A naan-off is pending and the results will be posted next-weekend (or, more likely, the week after it, once the author has recovered).

DoD: Tom Steel (for refusing to collect the abandoned ballbag after the game, despite being the youngest in the team, and for being worse than Timmy at catching segments of an orange in his mouth).

#IsThisAdelOrChernobyl? #TakeUsBackToWhenMenWereMenAndKidsHadRespect #BuffetEnvy

Match details

Match date

Sat 18 Mar 2023

Kickoff

13:30

Competition

Yorkshire & North East Men's Division 1

League position

5
Durham City 1
9
Leeds Adel 2
Team overview
Further reading