Northern Blues wins woman’s hockey championships

The Northern Blues had to dug deep to win the recent SA Women’s Interprovincial Hockey Tournament for the first time, with a 5-4 victory over Western Province at a packed Greenfields Turf stadium in Pietermaritzburg.

Both sides had early crosses that flashed dangerously across the face of goal, just missing the strikers’ outstretched sticks.

WP opened the scoring in the 13th minute with a well-worked penalty to lead 1-0 at half time.

Northerns came back to level the score at 1-all after Kim Hubach scored in the 49th minute before going on to win a sudden-death penalty shootout for the eventual victory.

The final, however, did not reach the heights of some of the pool games, one of which was the Blues’ 2-0 win over WP four days earlier.

In the final too many unforced errors such as passes not connecting with receivers were creeping in. Perhaps the consequence of five days of hard matches and associated player fatigue and gold medal nerves also has something to do with their struggle.

Concerted WP pressure saw them come close to scoring but the Blues eventually managed to scrambled the ball away each time.

In the last ten minutes, the battle on the track became really exciting and a lob at goal had WP fans excited, but it was blocked. In the closing stages of the match a sublime piece of skill by Izelle Verster saw teammate Marlene Nortje come close to putting Blues in front.

WP won consecutive penalties in the last two minutes and Hubach cleared the second off the line with 23 seconds left, the nail-biting final going into a penalty shootout.

After the regulation five shootout opportunities still hadn’t broken the deadlock, the final went into three rounds of sudden-death and Van Zyl of Northern Blues delivered the knockout punch for the Northerns girls in their province’s 5-4 victory.