The Parkes United men's premier league hockey side have missed a golden opportunity to claim their first win of the 2017 season, going down to Orange Wanderers 7-3 on Saturday afternoon in Parkes.
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With both sides on the bottom of the men’s Premier League Hockey standings, players were desperate to secure their first win.
Saturday’s round four clash was the perfect time to do so.
After the stars aligned United fielded potentially their strongest line up of the year on paper for the game.
But it was not to be as they were outplayed by a youthful Wanderers side.
United themselves are a youthful side as they continue to blood their younger players.
However it was a sluggish performance across the park that lead Wanderers to notch their first win of the season.
United did not disgrace themselves.
They had as many opportunities to score throughout the course of the game but were unable to capitalise on them in a frustrating performance for both the side and coaches.
Adam Hurford was the major beneficiary of the work of Wanderers’ in scoring a his first career hat-trick.
While Adam Skelton converted a double, with Caiden Reddan and Luke Skelton also scored.
For United Jack Elliott converted a double, with Brad Gardiner also scoring.
“It's a disappointing result for sure,” Parkes United captain Dan Wilson said.
“This is about as close as we will get to full strength this year and we have put in a performance that was not at the standards we expect.
“We come looking good and creating chances.
“But we could not convert and we got frustrated.”
Wilson said as the game progressed and the side moved away from its structure, United started trying to run the ball out of defence and through the midfield.
“This led to turnovers and having numbers run at our defence which led to the chances they converted,” he said.
“But we take the positives away from that and learn from where we went wrong, and move onto to facing Lithgow Panthers this coming week.”
The game in Lithgow hits off at 1.30pm.