In honour of my cousin’s daughter – Whitney Souness – and the entire article devoted to her in Saturday’s newspaper, here is another match report from my brief career as a netballer and sports writer with the Hospital Hot Shots many years ago:
From: Kirsty Jordan
Sent: Monday, 3 February 2014 10:19 p.m.
Subject: RE: Match report versus Last minute
Hi All,
My turn to write the match report, my last one was generally characterised by ill informed verbosity, which may be why it’s been a while since I’ve been asked to write another one. Anyone should feel free to correct any factual errors. Apologies for the lateness of the report, too: there has been much competition for the desktop this evening.
Firstly, the good news is that the team which beat us yesterday, “last minute” aren’t actually a proper team in our grade, so we have been recorded as having won last nights match.
Tonights opponents were “PMS” whom we have played a few times before and have beaten, although generally quite closely. They had just the minimum six players, whereas there were eight of us, which was a great advantage in a fast moving game in sauna-like conditions. In addition to the seven listed below, we also had Hannah whose cardiac list luckily finished in time. Our umpire was Jane whom I think is everyones favourite ( although she called me for “contact” when I was miles away from the player, in the first five minutes, but no ones perfect ).
The positions everyone was playing in, in decreasing order of accuracy on my part, were: Sarah-A; Me-D; Kate-C,A;Deane-C;Hannah-D,C; Jonny-D; actually I’m going to stop there because I wasn’t paying enough attention, sorry, that’s embarrassing.
The PMS game plan was very similar to ours. They mostly went for one pointers rather than two, unlike our opponents last night. Their male C was particularly skilled, he got a couple of two pointers and lots of intercepts. We had the height advantage in our team ( their female D was especially vertically challenged, very difficult trying to defend against Sarah, Joe and Jonny ) but he seemed to make himself taller somehow when intercepting our passes. I had a very clumsy game, I fell over or ran into the person I was marking a number of times. Generally I was called but it certainly was irritating for my opponent ( I did apologise at the end ). Also I had equipment issues – multiple shoelace failures. It was nice having Jonny in the circle on defence, he caught lots of rebounds. At the other end of the court, Sarah and the other shooters were also very reliable. Even so, it was a very close match early on, and we were losing by a point after the first quarter, 11:12. However, we steadily clawed our way back after that, getting the lead after the second quarter and steadily extending it every quarter after that. Having two subs was a huge advantage. We stuck by our original game plan and never got flustered, although some of our huge passes were perhaps rather unnecessarily ambitious. Final score 35:23(26?). Joe was aggreived at the end to notice our best scoring quarter was when he was off the court. I reassured him the same thing happened to me last night, and it wasn’t statistically significant. He very kindly helped the team playing after us ” it will only be for a minute… ” but he ended up having to play the entire game, which just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.
All in all a satisfactory evening, although a sad note at the end was Hannah losing a much loved earring.
Joe tells me I will be in charge of the team in a fortnight, hope the power doesn’t go to my head.
Better send this off before you all go to bed.
Cheers,
Kirsty.