The U12s Athletic 2019/20 story so far...
Just to bring you up to date, there has been a great deal of change over the past 12 months for this Moor Mead Athletic team.
With the move from junior to senior school, some of the players (and coaches) said goodbye to the team as they moved on to pastures new. We would like to extend our thanks to those players that have worn the Moor Mead shirt with pride. Their time and effort and no little skill is a large part of where the Athletic team is now. Many thanks to Sammie Hayes, Fred Mair, Jack Bryce-Smith, Toby Dane, Taylor Giles and, most importantly,
Sammie’s dad, Will, who led the training of the year group from Reception year through to the end of Year 6 and set up and drove the Athletic team forward with enthusiasm and determination. We wish you all great success with your new schools and new teams – maybe we’ll see you back here one day!
So, we approached this 2019/20 season with a very new team – recruiting players by word of mouth to get the squad up to full strength.
A few of the old guard (Nathan, Alex, Sam, Brendan, Barney, Giulio and Jesper) are still here, around whom we’ve built the new team. The players we’ve brought in (Dan, Liam, Roshan, Ronnie … and Nico, Marcus and Finn from the Cosmos squad) have all added their own style to the squad and there are signs of a good team spirit developing.
It has proved to be a tricky start to the season for Athletic u12s as we failed to win a match before half-term was upon us. In those half-dozen matches we’d been competitive, played some great football but ended up being defeated more often than not, drawing our first match and losing the rest. Losing 4-2 twice to local rivals, Twickenham Saints, was bad enough but losing 4-3 to Ashtead when we were 3-0 up with 10 minutes to go was heart-breaking. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And so it would seem. We’re still waiting for our first league win this season but we have progressed to the quarter-finals of the Chairman’s Cup with two strong performances (7-0 and 6-2) since half term.
Congratulations to all the players that have kept going and didn’t get down-heartened by the lack of wins in the first few games. The recent victories are nothing more than we deserved. Here’s hoping that our cup form can be continued in the league this Saturday with an away match at Key Sports Elite.