For its return to Choi Hung, the AKITA team was facing a significant rate of defections with Markus, Lars and Yoann suffering from sickness and Rolf, Alex and Guillaume also unavailable. In the starting seven, Dominik replaced Markus on the left wing whereas the other field positions remained as per last week with Ulf on the line and from left to right Stefan, Norbert, Hans and PA. The keepers decided to have Angus starting with Wan on the bench seating next to Michael, Nobel and Matsuo. PHOENIX is one of the team with a good experience in the league, they qualified for the promotion part of the championship but fade to finish 5th last year and will expect to go better this year.
PHOENIX started with the ball but their first 2 attacks were well controlled by the AKITA defence. As the usual top scorer of the team, it was no surprise to see Hans opening the score after 2 minutes, unfortunately some good goalkeeping and less precise than usual shooting prevented him from scoring more in that half. With Stefan also scoring only one in the first half, AKITA had to find some options away from halves shooting. The centre-line relationship was the favourite option with Norbert scoring 2 penalties obtained in the first 6 minutes and Ulf making the score 6 -1. Number 17, clearly the best player of the PHOENIX team on the day, managed a left wing shot and a penalty to come back but Ulf answered this first goal before giving a beautiful pass to Matsuo on the line to answer the second.
With the heat and humidity impacting the fitness of players, AKITA was trying to maximise the turnover. With 10 minutes to play PHOENIX was back at 7 - 5 which is when AKITA started to create wing opportunities. Michael who just came in on the left wings scored the first of 4 consecutive AKITA goals. Norbert found a way through the defence for a close range shot and PA squeezed through the tiniest gap a right wing shot. To conclude this good sequence, Michael scored again as he enjoyed a huge gap on the left wing as his defender mistimed an interception. PHOENIX number 14 managed to score 2 more whereas Norbert made it 4 in the first half to reach a 12 - 7 half time score.
The half time was mostly about recuperation and players were reminded to maintain the focus for the rest of the match. AKITA had 10 good minutes where they managed to widen the gap. PA and Norbert scored penalties to make it 14 -8 and Hans and Stefan found the targets for a 16 -9, the biggest gap of the match. As players were tired, the changes were a little wide as PA and Ulf were plugging the holes playing in different positions depending on who needed some rest. Also, the AKITA team was sloppier in defence and after 2 exclusions in the first half, they suffered another 4 in the second half. Dominik scored for a 18 - 12 lead but this was followed by 5 minutes with no goals allowing PHOENIX to come back to 4 goals only. This was the time for a well needed coaching time-out to ask players to slow down and survive the last 7 minutes. PHOENIX even came back to three but the AKITA team kept a cool head and Norbert took responsibility with a goal to restore a 4 goals advantage.
Unfortunately he got excluded on the following defence and this was followed by a red card for Dominik preventing a fast break that forced AKITA to be with 4 field players only for few moments. This was the time the referees took a pretty uncommon decision raising their hand for lack of play before even the restart following a goal because they found the keeper tool too much time to send the ball back to the centre. Unfortunately for PHOENIX, it resulted in the AKITA being extra motivated and PA immediately took a shot from 9 meters to put the match away from PHOENIX. Hans completed this with his 4th goal to make it 5 up with one to play. A last PHOENIX goal did not matter and the AKITA team was relieved to take the full points in a match that they made unnecessarily interesting up to the end.
The next match will also be outside but at an even more unfortunate time so most of today's players were hoping for a cool down of the weather.
Norbert 6, Hans 4, PA 3, Ulf 2, Michael 2, Stefan 2, Matsuo 1, Dominik 1.
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