6 March 2023
Last Tuesday, the mighty water polo team went to Harrow School to compete in their first ever national plate semi final. It was a very competitive event with schools from all over the country coming to compete for the right to go through to the plate final, with only the top 2 teams going through. The teams involved included Harrow, Ibstock, St Paul’s, Charterhouse and Abingdon. Our tournament started off competitive right from the start with our match against Harrow, requiring us to be on our A game right from the mini bus. We started extremely strong by winning against one of our biggest competitors with a solid victory of 5-3, after some dominant last minute blocks from our outstanding defence and an unstoppable counter-attack. This victory put us in good stead for the rest of the tournament! Our next match was against a brand new opponent in the form of Ibstock. We had no clue what to expect from these opponents! We started off very strong by firing through 2 consecutive goals, putting in a dominant start to the match. However, due to their strong attacking and a few miscommunications, Ibstock managed to put two behind us, evening up the scoreline before the half. After an inspiring team talk from our coach, Aaron, we came out of the half storming, managing to put 3 more past their defence, dominating the second half, winning our second game.
Having secured our second victory, we went into the second match with the stance of, if we win, we’re through to the final. However, the team we had to beat in our next match would be our most difficult opponent, St Paul’s. At the start of the year our team was beaten 5-2 against St Paul’s in our first matchup, so we knew this would be a very challenging game to win. We started the game quite slowly, having been dazed after a long break since our last game, meaning St Paul’s were able to get 2 quick goals in before the half, after Can Tugcetin, our star midfielder, managed to bury one in the top corner to secure a goal to cut the lead down to just one before the half. After another speech from Aaron, telling us that the victory is there if we wanted it, we came out of the blocks storming again. We managed to get two amazing goals on the back of both Will d’Arcy and Henry Dearden after the break putting us up 3-2. However, before the final whistle, St Paul’s managed to bury two very unlucky goals past us making the end score 4-3 to St Pauls.
After this loss, we realised that we had to beat our final opponent, Charterhouse, if we wanted to get through to the national final. Charterhouse were the water polo clubs first ever match, in which we got thrashed 21-1 so there was a strong sense of revenge brewing in the Abingdon camp. We knew that we had to put a bunch of goals past Charterhouse if we wanted to increase our goal difference to give us the best chance of getting through. After our loss against St Paul’s, we buried a load of goals in the first half putting us up 6-0 at half time, not allowing them to get a single shot at goal in the first half. In the second half the dominance didn’t stop with us putting 3 more goals past their keeper! However, as time went on towards the end of the tournament, we became a bit sloppy allowing three goals to get past us. Although we let some goals past at the end of the match, we put on one of the most dominant performances in our club history and in the entire tournament, securing our place into the National Plate Final at Northampton.
This was a resounding success for the Abingdon water polo club and demonstrates massively how much the team has come since our founding a year and a half ago. Massive thanks to Mr Mason and Aaron (coach) for their massive help and coaching to get us to this point. Now onto the National Final!
