Today we took a large squad of 13 players to the annual pre-season opening festival hosted by St Albans at Colney Heath. This is a good tournament that allows you to get your team playing together for the first time against other district associations in a non-competitive environment, allowing the coaches to work on a few things (shape, individual positions etc.).

There were ten different teams here today, and they were split into two groups resulting in four matches each of 2 x 8 minutes. We would play all of our games on pitch #2 and up first would be London Borough of Brent. Brent has a long history of producing good players/teams, and there have been some good players to come out of this London borough including Raheem Sterling, not surprising for an inner London area that is home to around 330,000 people and based around Kilburn, Queens Park and Wembley.

We started with Mason in goal and opted for a back three of Rudy, Harrison and George. Efe and Reggie would pair up in central midfield, with Arthur and Theo providing the width, and Jeremy starting up front. It was quite an even game over 16 minutes, but the game was decided by one error in the Stevenage defence that gifted Brent with the winner.

Our second game of the morning paired us with long-travelling Newbury District. This is another large area, roughly twice the size of Stevenage, which allows them to select two teams most years and today we would be facing their ‘B’ squad. Mason continued between the sticks and in front of him was a back three of Charlotte, Harrison and Rudy. Luke would join Efe in midfield with George and Leo now providing us with some wide options and Henry would start up front. We were much improved in this game and dominated for long periods, Luke Horncastle gave us the lead with a delicate chip in the first half, and he doubled the lead with an amazing run from inside his own half before firing home for 2-0.

Game #3 would be against host team St Albans. Being a city, St Albans also dwarfs Stevenage in terms of number of schools and available players, and every year they are able to field two teams and run a development (U10) squad. Today’s game would be against their ‘Blues’ squad and we made a few slight changes with George shifting to CB and Leo dropping back into the LB position. Jeremy was starting wide right, and we paired Arthur and Reggie in the centre. This was another even game settled by a single goal for the hosts, but we had our moments. We felt that the team were lacking attempts at goal, afraid to shoot, we tried to convince them to take more shots in our final game of the day.

That final game, of a busy morning, would be against the St Albans Development team. Although they were younger, the fact that we had a number of U10’s plus Charlotte playing I thought it would still be a very close affair. The players had listened to our instructions to shoot more often, and Rudy was the first to go close when he saw not one but two efforts come back off of the post during one attack.
Reggie also saw a longer-range effort hit the crossbar as Stevenage dominated. The opening goal of the game came from Luke once again, as he scored at the far post and this was eventually doubled when Rudy got on the end of a shot/cross from Theo to make it 2-0.

Overall, it was a very pleasing morning, I know that the opposition in the second group was stronger but, then again, we are a very small association and usually rely on having U10’s in our team every season as we just don’t have the numbers nor quality that other districts can choose from.

Considering this, I just wanted to highlight the performances of Charlotte Toll today, for a girl to play at this very high level is incredibly rare (in boy’s District teams) but she was selected today to come along with the team as she has worked extremely hard in training and was here on merit. She played in three of the four games and didn’t look out of place and she will definitely get to play in a competitive fixture at some stage this season which, when it happens, will make her the first girl ever to represent Stevenage District at this level – an achievement that she will no doubt be proud of and something that she can boast to her friends and family for years to come. Well done today Charlotte!