Today we travelled away to Darlington FC Women in our final game of 2024. Wind was out in force today which certainly impacted the game for both teams.

Darlington won the toss at kick off playing with the wind behind them in first half which they used to their advantage and were on the constant attack. In the 4th minute of play after one of these attacked we put the ball out for a corner. A superb ball came in from the Darlington player seeing young winger Ava challenge for the ball in the air. Unfortunately the ball headed into the back of the net giving the hosts the lead. The girls battled back hard for the equaliser without any reward. The wind really was incredibly hard to play against and the team concentrated on keeping the score line at 1-0 until a change of ends at half time. This worked and we got to the break with the host in the lead by only 1 goal.

The second half saw a much better performance by the team, the wind behind the side rather than against allowed them to keep the ball on the floor and have more control over where it went. We were on the constant attack seeing striker Mel force the Darlington keeper to pull off a very impressive over the bar save to deny us on the 49th minute. Half time substitute Zarr took the corner using the advantage of the wind and sending the ball crashing into the top right corner of the goal to level the score line once again.

This spurred the girls on to look for the next goal which came in the 57th minute on the counter from a Darlington break. Keeper Charlie kicked the ball over the top seeing Zarr make a superb run, getting the ball under control and sending it crashing past the keeper. We took the lead for the first time in the game.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep the lead for long seeing Darlington steal the ball from one of our attacks in the 60th minute of play and countering to once again equal the score lines.

Both teams continued to battle on to find that winning goal seeing both sides net but be ruled off side by the referee. The game ended 2-2 which was a fair point to share based on the two teams performances.

Player of the match today was awarded to our super substitute Zarr for her fantastic energy and work-rate she brought into the game seeing her score two very important and well taken goals to get us the well earned draw.