Girls’ Soccer for 2009
JUNIOR SOCCER:
2009 saw the greatest participation in girls’ soccer since 2006. We started the year with the participation in our Victoria Park Soccer Challenge, where we were able to enter 4 U/15 and 2 U/17 teams. Needless to say, the U/15 final was contested by VP teams. This year’s league season was disappointing in the sense that other schools in our immediate area have not embraced girls’ soccer and that left our junior girls and their coaches extremely frustrated.
Nevertheless, the girls, led by a very passionate young team of coaches trained on a weekly basis taking whatever opportunities they had to play matches. The season ended on a very high note for some of the girls as they were selected for the U/15 SAFA – Nelson Mandela Bay Soccer team. They are goalkeeper Rachel Munro, defenders Tessa Wattam and Kayla Barnard, midfielder Anuschka Assam and striker Fatima Khan.
I would also like to extend my congratulations to Maxine Bonnage and Tessa Wattam (both in grade 8), who as beginners, showed great promise and temperament to be selected to represent the school’s first team in the PEFA Women’s League. These two young girls have a bright future ahead of them and we should hear of great achievements from them should they show the same dedication and commitment to the game that they did this year.
I would to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate Miss Danielle Deyzel, Miss Christine Vorster, Mr Brett Bennett, Miss Jayde Howitz and Mr Gareth Angles who between busy schedules at university gave up their afternoons to lead, inspire and instill confidence and love for soccer in our junior players. They have all done a great service to VP Girls’ Soccer and I salute them!
SENIOR TEAM:
Our first team has been “under construction” since 2006. Each year the team performed progressively better and better, we managed to retain players that started playing in 2006 while they were in grade 8 and grade 9. These players now form a very strong core of our team and their experience has made it easy for us to introduce other young players into the team to ensure VP Girls’ Soccer remains one of the best teams in PE, if not the best!
We started the year playing in the VP Soccer Challenge, where we reached the final unbeaten and without conceding a goal in 7 matches! The final was against Hankey, whom we had beaten 1 – 0 in the group stages of the tournament. Unfortunately, we could not convert any of the chances we created to score in a match that we had clearly dominated. The match had to be settled by a penalty shoot-out. After 16 penalties taken, Hankey emerged as the winners. The tournament would later prove to be good preparation for the season that lay ahead. In the school’s league, we emerged with 9 wins from 10 games, with a loss to Walmer High School being our only hick-up.
While participating in the schools’ league, the VP Mustangs as we were fondly known took on women’s teams in the P.E.F.A Women’s league every Sunday morning against teams such as Callies, St Georges, PE City, NMMU, etc. We kicked off the season with a 5 – 0 win against St Georges, a 3 – 3 draw against Callies, which was followed by a 3 – 2 win over NMMU! The rest of the season proved to be very competitive with the girls producing similar results on a weekly basis. These performances ensured that we finish in 3rd position after playing 20 matches, with the most points in the PEFA league – 41, the previous best being 25 points in 2007. At the end of the leagues season, we took part in the PEFA Women’s Knockout competition. We saw NMMU off in the semi-finals with 4 – 0 victory to qualify for a thrilling final against Callies.
THE KNOCKOUT FINAL:
The week leading up to the final, we had two training sessions. In the first of these we concentrated and worked on group defending in order to soak pressure from Callies and to try and frustrate them by not allowing any space in midfield and especially no space in our defending zone.
During the next session we worked on penalties, winning goal would come either from a set-piece or a counter attack. As it turned out, our planning worked to the “T”! Callies were forced to play sideways for the entire game without any penetration or threatening our goals. We had 3 chances in the first half to score from counter – attacks, but could not convert.
The second half saw more of the same, only with Callies taking shots from 30m away from our goals which proved to be easy pickings for our Eastern Province captain and goalkeeper! We continued to create chances on the counter attack as Susan Wells, Jovanka Djuza, Louise Pretorius and Melanie Beukes ran rings around Callies’ defence. Still, the goals wouldn’t come.
During the last 10 minutes of the game, with scores tied at 0 – 0, the coaching staff, after much debate on the bench, made an inspired substitution taking off a defender and bringing on Kay-lyn Oelofse into the attack. We won a corner kick with exactly 5 minutes left in the game and Kay-lyn (with her first touch on the ball); hit an unstoppable volley from inside the penalty box to give us a much deserved win in the final!
The 2009 squad that brought glory to VP was made up of the following players: B Köhne, C Froneman, R Rödeler, N Astrie, T Wattam, L Pretorius, J Howitz, N Mhlauli, S Wells, N Maheneza, M Bonnage, K van Rooyen, J Barron, V Ntozini, J Djuza, M Beukes, M Nobrega, C Vorster, K Oelofse, F Borlinghaus and S Gqabaza.
Thank you to Mr Marlon Louis and Mr Kagan Assam for assisting me with the preparation of this team in 2009, we would not have achieved our great results without these two brilliant coaches!
Mr T Thoba (Coach)
