Reading Rascals 1 Old Loughtonians Academy 3

Saturday 31^st January 2009

Sport can be strange sometimes – you can do almost everything right, dominate the game but still lose and so it proved as the Rascals travelled to the other side of the world  to come second to the OLA  in an extremely good game of free flowing Hockey.Rascals started at a great pace and pinned the home side deep in their own half for much of the opening 20 minutes – there was movement, there was slick passing and there was ball speed yet they found themselves behind to a sucker goal when the ball bounced up and behind ‘keeper Johnnie Ashby into the path of the OLA striker who could not fail to score from about 5 cms.

Rascals responded and created chance after chance at the other end and finally after a quick interchange of passes Josh Gemmill scored to level the scores at half time. The pattern continued for much of the second half with Rascals applying constant pressure yet failing to convert their openings before finally going 2 goals behind.

There were some performances of note though – Adam Langford, always a player likely to quicken the pulse, had a fine game in centre midfield and will best be remembered for the pass of the season so far – 30 yards, splitting 2 defenders and inch perfect to a Reading attacker was a memorable moment and Ekham Baku gave everything with his selfless running and high work rate and had his best game this term – it is not always easy to do the hard running to close down players for little gain but it took the pressure off his team mates

A cameo performance by Jeremy Cooke was not without its moment – still suffering from head butting the backboard at Southgate, Cooke swapped for Ian Ashby at the start of the second half, passed the ball, made a visionary run of at least 20 yards, took the pass back and passed it on with all the fluidity of running water – he then departed shortly afterwards to the bench well satisfied with his afternoon’s work!

Without doubt,  the Rascals need to improve their shooting inside the area and not always try to pass the ball into the net.  It doesn’t matter if it is not cleanly struck as arguably a badly hit shot is more difficult to deal with.  Shooting creates uncertainty, pressure and ultimately more chances,