Surbiton travel for a second successive weekend

By Seán Cotter (25.9.2009)

Tomorrow (Saturday 26 September) Surbiton, who finished fifth in England’s ten-team elite league last season, are away again, this time in North London (Paddington Rec, 2pm) to play Hampstead & Westminster, who finished only two places, but 14 points (having had one deducted), behind them.

Last season Surbiton drew the equivalent fixture at the Rec 4-4 on 19 October - having lost 3-4 to a golden goal in the second (but opening for national league sides) round of the England Hockey Cup at the same venue two weeks earlier - but won 5-2 at Sugden Road in the reverse league fixture on 22 February (all Sunday games).

However, Surbiton will not be in action on Sunday in this season’s second round of the EH Cup, being one of the four Premier Division teams not to enter it (the other three being East Grinstead, Loughborough Students and University of Exeter).

While Surbiton came back to win 4-3 at Bowdon in their opening league fixture last Sunday (20 September) thanks to Matt Daly’s four penalty corner conversions, Hampstead & Westminster were, rather unluckily by some accounts, going down 0-2 at runners-up Reading.

But the Maida Vale club should know all about Daly’s penalty corner prowess. Their coach, Todd Williams, in his second spell in that position, was Surbiton assisting coach for the past two seasons, while their Welsh international forward Andy Cornick, played last season at Sugden Road.

This week’s trip will be somewhat shorter than that to Bowdon, which is located near Altrincham in the leafy commuter belt south of Manchester and the home of many of the city’s football stars.

So it was a bit of a coincidence that Surbiton, based in the footballers’ wives’ London equivalent of Esher, ended up with the identical 4-3 scoreline to the derby starting at Old Trafford half an hour earlier.

However at South Downs Road it was the away team who triumphed in the end as the visitors got their 2009/10 England Hockey League Premier Division campaign off to a winning start, but only after an agonising first half on the sidelines for their coach Karl Stagno, no longer a player/coach.

The former Gibraltarean international, who has been the highly successful head of hockey at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, for five years now, reflected afterwards: “It was a very poor first-half display that saw us trailing 1-3 at the interval."

“They made things very difficult for us by swamping the midfield with their 4-4-2 formation against our usual 4-3-3."

“But after we changed to 3-4-3 at the interval, I was very happy with the way we settled into the game at last, turning it round and setting up more than enough open-play chances to win even more convincingly.”

In the event, Stagno had in fact to be grateful to one of his five European gold medallists, Matt Daly, for scoring all the goals from set pieces.

The 26-year-old dragflicker, who teaches at Kingston Grammar School as well as being a contracted England international, made Graham Wilson’s Tuesday “Daily Express” hockey column headline by rifling home 70 mph unstoppable bullets from all but two of the penalty corners his team forced.

Which proved to be just as well since Bowdon scored from all three penalty corners that they won.

His stopper failed to trap properly from Surbiton’s first attempt, but after that the injection routine worked perfectly to set up Daly to wing home his lethal bullets to all corners of the Bowdon net, past and sometimes off, the keeper and four defenders on the line, with the exception of his fourth attempt that was only kept out illegally at the expense of another penalty corner, from which Daly made no mistake.

The sixth and decisive penalty corner came ten minutes from time with Bowdon reduced to ten men through a yellow card awarded a minute earlier.

Copy for “Surrey Comet” and “Surrey Advertiser Elmbridge Edition” 25 September 2009