Won 4-3
Scorers: John Aikin (4)
MoM: Simon Triggs at the back and John Aikin at the front!
DoD: not awarded
A very tight and competitive game that saw ‘John Boy’ Aikin score yet another hatrick – indeed he scored 4 goals – one more than last week. He’s obvs’ trying to wrap up the golden boot award before Christmas. However hockey is a team game and he needs his own son Arthur and Tom (Rogers) to help him achieve this milestone! Seriously though some of his goals were outstanding and he thoroughly deserved his Player of the Match award but that was only half the story as at the other end Simon Triggs in goal, despite the scoreline played a blinder and got excellent value for his match fee. He has his own personal season’s target but that is a strictly family affair so cannot be revealed until Friars lawyers have cleared for publication.
Nonetheless it was a veritable collection of misfits – half injured bods and ‘trying to come back to fitness people’ who trotted on and trotted off the pitch at regular intervals during the match. There were rumours of Lord Lucan (of Corinthian Spirit) being present and even a Bulldog with dodgy knees but your reporter cannot verify this as there were for the Friars many supporters. Even Mr Grumpy turned up to watch at the end.
Anyway on with the hockey ……within minutes of a delayed start John Aikin had slotted his first. T Wells got back a goal shortly after but Aikin followed up with 2 more, one drilled past the keeper at a penalty corner. He got subbed off immediately and quite rightly as he was being greedy by now only for T Wells to get another back for the score to be 3-2 at half time. Jaffa cakes notwithstanding the visitors came out of the blocks for the second half and grabbed one back to equalise and it seemed the points would be shared. However Tom Rogers on only his second adult match thought otherwise – taking off from well within the Friars half he hit a powerful reverse stick pass with pin eyed accuracy to Aikin (snr) to take it into the penalty circle and clinically finish for the winner 10 minutes from time and yet another expensive round for him at the bar accompanied by some flap jack to increase the cholesterol intake.
There were some notable shifts from Geoff Philpott, Alex Ricketts on his (middle-aged) league debut for Canterbury – no youngster he, Tom Parkin and John Ratcliffe with the latter 2 especially digging deep.
Many Thanks to Phil (Sandy), Simon (Downes) and Les Guru for umpiring – yep the Friars really do need 3 umpires these days.