A feisty match against Bradford

There’s no sugarcoating it, when we played Bradford earlier in the season, they took us completely by surprise and wiped the floor with us. So we were preparing for today’s match with trepidation. We’ve had some great games against Bradford, hopefully this was going to be one of them.

We started well, we were on the attack, we knew Bradford’s key players from previous games, and knew to watch the hit outs for their strange directions. We were marking out the strong attackers and keeping the ball in Batley possession.

There’s some disagreement about who scored first, Gail says it was her, Ash says it was her. I’m not sure it matters too much, so I’m writing about both of the goals together.

For one of the goals, Kim maneuvered the ball into the D, around the Bradford defence and Ash got on the end of a great cross to fire the ball home. For the other, we had a short corner, Vicky accidentally pushed the ball out to Gail instead of Linda, Gail took a beautifully aimed and and sweetly hit strike straight at the goal and scored! We were 2-0 up.

Bradford aren’t top of the league by chance though and they weren’t going to take this lying down. They were straight back on the attack. It was on one of these attacks when Vicky accidentally (and I genuinely mean it was accidental, it’s not just because I’m on her team) pushed the ball to the wrong Bradford player for one of their hit outs. This was a changing point in the game as the Bradford umpire gave Vicky a green card for this. Which I concede is perfectly within the rules, but there was no warning to Vicky and it really was just a misunderstanding, there was no malice.

Down to 10 players for 2 minutes, we were going to have to be really careful not to let Bradford through. We were strong and we managed to keep Bradford away from any really attacks while we were down.

Back to 11 a piece and there was some more umpire drama as the Bradford umpire tried to give a short corner in the Batley umpire’s D. This didn’t go down well with our umpire and we stopped time for a while to watch the umpires and the Bradford coach have a little argument on the pitch. The short corner didn’t stand.

We could see Bradford were getting riled now and we were feeding on the tension on the pitch. There were several more time stoppages as our umpires disagreed on decisions.

At halftime, we were 2-0 up and confident we could keep this going.

We were expecting Bradford to come back fighting in the second half and we weren’t wrong. We were ready for them though and still not letting them through. We were attacking back and breaking through when we could.

Bradford did eventually break through our defence on a short corner, the ball went straight through the defences legs and into our net, 2-1.

We conceded a few more short corners in this half, a cynical person might say that’s because we’d switched umpires. I’m not that person. It was during a short corner that we had another umpiring fall out. We were waiting for the corner, Bradford we’re ready to take it, the Bradford player moved to take the shot, I started to run (but that’s ok, because I’m on the half way) Helen shouted “GO” and we broke from the goalline. Bradford hadn’t hit the ball. The Bradford umpire sent both Fretters and Mel to the halfway line, leaving us with 2 defenders for the corner. There wasn’t anything said however, to the Bradford player who looked like she was going to take the hit, the Bradford umpire “Didn’t see anything”. The Batley umpire pointed out that she should also have been sent to the halfway line for dropping her shoulder without playing the ball. On the replay, the Batley umpire spotted a Bradford foul on the corner and stopped play before Bradford could get a shot on, they did still shoot however, and Helen saved it. Alls well that ends well.

At this point, one of the Bradford players got sent off for being mouthy. Shortly after this, another Bradford player was sent off when she hit the ball away from our players on a hit out, with malice, no joke.

The game was quite scrappy and aggressive after this, there were still some stoppages and Bradford brought the attack in the last 10 minutes, pushing their entire team up the field at the expense of their defence. We did managed to break a couple of times during this, but never quite made it into the net.

The game finished 2-1 to Batley and we were delighted with the win, they way we’d kept calm despite all the craziness and we’d played one of the best games of the season. MOM went to Mel, there were also 3 votes for the whole team, because that’s how good we were!

Tomorrow we play Cleckheaton, maybe, third time lucky for this match.

#win #batleyladieshc #matchreport