ESFA Midland Region Football Competition

On Saturday 15th March the school's football team travelled to Nottingham to represent Lincolnshire in the Midland Region round of the ESFA Danone U11 Cup. 
In our group were;
Signhills Academy representing Humberside
Millway Primary  representing Northamptonshire
Westfield Primary representing Staffordshire
Redhill Primary representing Shropshire
Stivichall Primary representing West Midlands

The other group consisted of teams representing; Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire.

The first part of the competition was run as a league with games consisting of 2 five minute halves.
Our first game saw us taking on Westfield Primary. This was a very tight game with the only goal going to Westfield following a goalmouth scramble from a corner.
In our second game against Redhill our bad luck continued as we dominated most of the match but were unable to get a goal.  To make matters even worse Redhill managed to score with almost the last kick of the game when an attempted clearance hit one of their players and rebounded to their striker who found himself clean through on goal.
With 2 defeats we were now really under pressure and desperately needed a win in our next game against Signhills if we were to have any chance of staying in the competition. We played well and became the first team in our group to manage more than one goal in a game as we ran out winners by 3 goals to 0.
Our fourth game was against Stivichall. We need a win to keep qualification in our own hands but inspite of lots of pressure we were unable to get the breakthrough and the game ended 0-0.
This meant we had to win our last game and then hope other results went our way. Our opponents Millway were unbeaten so far and knew that a win for them would see them top the group and go into the semi-finals. We played our best football of the day and run out winners by 3 goals to 0, making us the top scorers in our group and joint highest scorers of all the teams.
We then had to watch the last game of the group between Signhills and Stivichall knowing that anything other than a draw would see us eliminated. As time began to run out in the second half the game became very end to end with both teams having chances to win but at the final whistle the score was still 0-0 and we were through to the semi-finals, improving on last years achievements.

As runners up in our group we had to play the winners of the other group - Badgerbrook Primary of Leicestershire. At this stage the games were extended to two seven minute periods. We got off to a slow start and were lucky to avoid going behind early on. Just as it looked like we were beginning to get into the game Badgerbrook took the lead midway through the first half. They then defended very physically and proved to be just too strong for us.
Badgerbrook then went on to defeat Westfield Primary in the final.

More photos - Thanks to Tarne and Ruby
Official Photos