Macedon (38) Drew Diggers Rest (38)
Diggers Rest set up a zone defence and this had our attack end stumped. We played into their hands and made quite a few uncharacteristic errors. We turned over 6 balls in attack and this meant that we had to fight hard with uncompromising defence. This defence earnt us 10 balls back. There was quite a lot of whistle, particularly from our WD and this meant that they had a spare attacking player to assist with feeding a fast ball into goals, while we were undermanned. We scored the last 5 goals in the quarter and that put us ahead by 1 heading into the 2nd.
We tidied up our attack and reduced our turnovers to an impressive 3. With the change of end, came a different style of umpiring and after a quarter time talk we cleaned up our defence. Our recoveries came from gains with Bella recovering 3 and Demi Y in the 2. We didn’t intercept a single pass in this quarter and this is something we address at training. 7 gains from our defence end and a rebound gave us the ball we needed to make up for our errors. Demi F dominated in attack with accurate feeds to our goalers. Georgia shot accurately, not wasting a single opportunity while Sammi’s shooting accuracy took a hit. Diggers GS was also feeling the pressure and shot at 40%. This levelled us out but we worked harder to win ball back and this gave us 3 goal lead heading into half time.
In the 3rd quarter our errors creeped back in, and we were penalised with an attacking offside, a step and a contact penalty. Our centre passes stayed solid as they were thrown and received strongly by Macedon players. Aleisha was kept quiet in the 3rd quarter with clean recoveries but spoiled 2 feeds into the goalers. Eliza moved out to the GD position and had an instant impact there with a gain, intercept and 2 rebounds. Dels had a spell in WD in the 3rd and worked hard with man on man defence recovering 2 balls. Both Diggers goalers were accurate in the 3rd quarter, and it didn’t help that their feeds were coming in from the circle edge. In our attack, Sammi came into her own shooting at 89% while Diggers defenders applied much more pressure to Georgia and this affected her accuracy. We had a 4 goal lead with 2 minutes to go when Diggers had another fight back and shot 2 in a row. This brought the score back to 30 -28 and we went into the last quarter with a 2 goal lead.
Our inexperience and fatigue kicked in in the last quarter and attacking the game and uncompromising defence was compromised. We turned over 7 balls throughout the whole court, with a costly step and held ball thrown in the mix. We started to need our defenders on our centre pass and had to work hard for a good shooting position and this increased our number of feeds. Our shooting opportunities slowed down and our accuracy drifted. We shot 8 from 12. In defence we maintained our average (7 recoveries) but needed to win more ball if we were going to take the win from an experienced Diggers Rest team. In the last quarter Diggers had three, 3 goal runs. We managed to hold them off right up until the last minute, when Diggers shot the last 3 goals of the game to steal the win from us.
I was very proud of the effort all the girls put out on the court today. We are a newly formed team with not many senior games under our belt and if this is how we play in round 3, I can only imagine how good we are going to be by round 10.