HOCKEY
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It's not everyday you’ll have a coach feeling upbeat after a 9-0 defeat, but that’s the vibe Souths women’s Premier League Hockey coach Adrian Cox has going into today’s game against hosts Lithgow Zig Zag.
The competition’s other Lithgow outfit, the ladder-topping Panthers, inflicted the big loss on Souths in the last round with a scoreline that would leave most teams reeling.
Instead it’s a game that has produced more positives than negatives in the eyes of Cox.
Cox said that Panthers’ superior level of hockey at this stage, compared to the competition’s other contenders, means last week’s loss wasn’t as bad as it first appears.
“Panthers are a step ahead of everyone else at the moment. With everyone else the competition feels very close. We’ve had a chance to play everyone else in the competition now and see where we’re at,” he said.
“The girls actually took a lot of confidence out of that game last week. I don’t think we played that badly at all, they were just far too good. If we play with that intensity for the whole game against Zig Zag we’ll do well.”
Souths go into this match looking to turn around a shock 2-1 loss to Zig Zag from the Premier League’s opening round of the season.
Cox said his team was not short of chances to win that match and that if Souths improve their conversion rate on such opportunities then the result will go their way.
“Zig Zag have got some really good players to look out for. Both those goals they got against us in that opening round were from penalty corners, so we’ve got to talk a lot about how we defend against those,” he said.
“When we played them in that first round match we definitely had the bigger share of the possession but they were the side that made the most of their chances.
“We’ve improved since that game. We’ve changed the way we play our game this year and changed the culture of the team. It’s taken a while for it to come together.”
Cox is looking forward to a big run of home games given the large amount of travelling the team has done during the first half of the season.
“It’s been difficult always being on the road. We’ve got a lot of home games coming up now, but being on 12 points we’ve got a lot of ground to make up now,” he said.
“We only had one home game in the entire first round and that was against Zig Zag in the Lithgow gala day, so it’s really been nine away matches so far.”
Ash Corby will be a welcome inclusion into the Souths team today and can give the two blues added punch up the front of the park.
However, Souths will be without the services of Daisy Morrissey and Sophie Macauley for the match, which begins at 2.40pm in Lithgow.