Rich's Blog: City Spirit Shows In Important Victories

The autumn chills may have set in but the hot streaks of City’s top teams have continued.

In the regional league, we have followed up a valiant 22-17 opening day defeat against last year’s champions, Bristol Thunder 1, with two wins. 

On 24 November, we got one of our best results in recent memory with a narrow 12-11 win against last season’s runners-up, Southampton Spartans. And, on Saturday, we secured a 19-10 victory in our match-up with Bristol Thunder 2 which, though technically a second team, is still packed full of height and talent. A special mention to James who came from a night shift to make his City regional debut in the latter match — and promptly scored seven goals!

In OKA league 1, we continued our strong start with a dominant 24-5 win against Oxford Uni. Our next OKA league 1 match, against Abingdon 1, is shaping up to be a huge one.

And in OKA league 2, City 2 also bagged two more wins — 14-4 against Isis 2 and 20-6 against Uni 2 — to set up a huge top-of-the-table clash against Isis 1. Isis 1 and City 2 are both gunning for a spot in league 1 next season, and the chance to beat our local rivals always adds extra spice! 

The match itself was a nip and tuck affair, with City taking and holding the lead, but never really accelerating away. However, City 2 held firm and came through with a 15-11 win. That’s now five wins from five and two of the toughest matches, against the newly-relegated Didcot 1 and Isis 1, out of the way as well. Next on the fixture list for City 2 is Team Tiger aka City 3.

After a strong start to the season, City 3 has faced a few tough matches, including losses of 5-10 and 7-17 against Isis 1 and Didcot 1 respectively. The goals have been dropping, though not in the numbers the Tigers would have liked, but there are some good battles coming up to put that right.

And finally, in the last month we have seen the first two matches for our newly-formed City 4, which followed up a 2-6 loss against Abingdon 3 in their first match with an 8-3 win against Reading Uni. 

So, all in all, it has been another strong month and we have been seeing great things from all our teams. Let’s keep this up for another month and go into 2016 on a high.

- Rich Heap, web editor