Stan Calvert Glory for Newcastle
Thursday saw the first ever appearance of korfball at the Stan Calvert Memorial Cup, the annual varsity competition between Newcastle and Northumbria. It was also a highly anticipated fixture with the match being broadcast across both NUTV and NSR, Morgan doing a fab job on the snapchat takeover as well as sports editor Mark Sleightholm from The Courier also being present.
After a fast paced start, Wilbert scoring early on followed by a quick fire Northumbria response, the game continued to be quick. Northumbria pulled 2-1 ahead before two back to back korfs of some well worked moves left us 3-2 up. Ten minutes in and the scores were level at 3-3 when we hit some trouble going 5-3 down. Coach Fran used one of the time-outs to help us re-group and it worked a treat along with the subs who had an immediate impact reducing the deficit to 5-4. Both sides added one to the score taking us into halftime at 6-5.
Some fresh legs coming on for the second half, we maintained a sustained period of pressure that Northumbria could simply not hold back, eventually letting us take the lead and extended it to 8-6 with only the last 15 minutes to be played. We looked set to pull further ahead, playing the better korfball and moving the ball much faster then Northumbria. Approaching the closing stages and some mighty defensive effort continued to hold Northumbria off until they scrapped one back with 2 minutes to play. However, they had no chance of capitalising on this as we were far too strong and managed to absorb the pressure incredibly well to seal an 8-7 win. It's fair to say we had some very proud #korfmoms!
On behalf of myself and the rest of the team we would also like to say thank you to all of the supporters who came along to watch. It made a real difference having you there and I'm pleased to hear you all enjoyed it; hopefully we'll see some of you again soon. Up next for Nighthawks (as far as I know) is BUCS National Plate with the draw to be made this Tuesday which will be live streamed by BSKA on Facebook. Northumbria are also in the draw so they may not have to wait until next year's Stan Calvert for revenge... who am I kidding yes they will ;)
