Written by: Katie Curly-Wurly-Kearsley-Wooller

The BAC firsts were up bright and early for the trek north to this week’s game against Leominster. After a last minute switch of venue due to flooding, BAC arrived at the Heifer Leisure Centre. We were honoured that Mr President himself, Terry Cook, was our umpire for the day and, after the initial curtseying and bowing, the President’s first official duty was a pitch inspection on the slightly frosty pitch. After the green light from the powers that be, the game was ready to start.

For once, we had a string of super subs sat on the bench, ready and raring to go. The bad news was that those subs were our injured trio of Bish, Tinny and Becky and their efforts were confined to shouting encouragement from the side-lines.

With the help of their encouragement, BAC got off to a cracking start, controlling the play and enjoying most of the possession. We quickly started to put pressure on the Leominster goal and won a short corner. Up stepped Tapper with a powerful strike straight into the bottom left hand corner of the goal to make it 1-0 to BAC.

Leominster started to get a bit more of the ball but some great hassling from BAC meant they struggled to get a foothold in the match. Maz stuck to Leominster’s playmaker, Lisa’s friend Archie, like her shadow to mark her out of the game. Debutant Kat was having a field day picking off Leominster passes and feeding the ball through to the forwards to launch some promising attacks.

It remained 1-0 at half time and BAC knew that Leominster were going to come out all guns blazing after the break. As expected, Leominster piled on the pressure right from the restart. BAC fought back but got caught on the break by a speedy Leominster attack and a great strike by the Leominster forward went in off the post.

In the final 20 minutes, both teams pushed for the breakthrough goal. After a BAC attack was thwarted by an unseen Leominster foot in front of goal, Leominster tested the BAC defence with a series of breaks and short corners. They threw everything at us but calm and disciplined defence by BAC prevented Leominster from taking the lead. Every promising Leominster cross or break seemed to have a BAC player (usually Cheryl) on the end of it. At one point, Deb Sledger was a bit too keen to put the pressure on Leominster and she picked up a green card for failing to retreat.

But, with less than a minute of the game left, the Leominster right wing drove the ball up the pitch and struck a speculative cross/shot into the D. It looked to be going wide but Archie managed to get her stick to the ball to deflect it into the goal, wrongfooting the BAC defence in the process. BAC only had seconds in which to try to grab an equaliser but a Leominster midfielder intercepted the ball and the final whistle blew.

It was a cruel end to the game and BAC were gutted with the result. However, there were lots of positives to take from the game with a fantastic, all round performance from everyone on the team.

Player of the match went to CHERYL, with Katie Curly-Wurley in second, Maz and Kat in third and Kay in fourth.

MOTM – CHEZZA!!!!