Cancellation frustration for team

A football team from Blenheim has been left ‘‘frustrated’’, ‘‘disappointed’’ and out of pocket after an away game – 220 kilometres away – got called off a few hours before kick-off.

Blenheim’s AFC Rangers were due to play the Golden Bay Shield Maidens in Ta¯ kaka on Saturday in the Nelsonpines Women’s premiership.

Kick-off was 1pm, but at 8am they received a text saying the game was off because the pitch was ‘‘underwater’’.

But several Rangers’ players were already in Ta¯ kaka, opting to drive over and stay there on Friday night. Ta¯ kaka is a 31⁄2 hour drive, at best, from Blenheim. The rest of the team were on the road when the game got canned.

Rangers’ coach Andrea Smithscott said the players who were in Ta¯ kaka went and had a look at the pitch on Saturday morning.

‘‘It was not underwater like they said, and a youth team was playing on it, so pretty frustrating really, no need at all for our game to be cancelled,’’ she said.

‘‘We were really looking forward to the game, and some of us had travelled over the night before, so naturally we were really disappointed with the cancellation due to weather.’’

Rangers were looking to carry on the good form they had shown in their last game, two weeks ago, where they were unlucky not to come away with a point in a narrow 5-4 loss to FC Nelson Women 1st XI. They had a bye last week.

Rangers had already made the call to default this coming Saturday due to low numbers. So by July 9, when they play Richmond, it will have been a month since their last fixture.

‘‘We will have no game this weekend either unfortunately.

We have way too many players away so have defaulted to Nelson Suburbs, and we’ll take the 3-0 loss instead,’’ Smith-scott said.

Meanwhile, three Marlborough footballers have been selected to take part in trials to represent a Nelson/marlborough U17 team to compete in the National Youth Development League next summer.

Fynn Hawes, Luc Sherwood, and Louie Poletti are trying out for the regional squad, which will compete against the best youth players across the country in a newly formatted tournament.

New Zealand Football said the new National Youth Development League would replace the old National Age Group Tournament (NAGT) that saw the regions’ best players battle it out in a weeklong tournament in December.

The new league would be played out over two months at the end of the current winter season in order to extend and elevate the development environment for New Zealand’s top male and female youth players.

New Zealand Football (NZF) technical director Andy Boyens said the new system was an ‘‘exciting development’’ for the country’s youth players.

‘‘While the NAGT format had a lot of positive feedback from participants, who really enjoyed the tournament experience, we were also conscious of the format’s drawbacks from a development and player welfare point of view, with so many games crammed into a short space of time,’’ Boyens told the NZF website.

‘‘We believe this new format allows for the best of both worlds for our up-and-coming players.’’