Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
HOCKEY COACH CALLS FOR SIDE TO CONQUER ALL
Canterbury Hockey Club coach Craig Boyne has challenged his players to go the rest of the season unbeaten after they became the first team to beat Oxted.
Boyne’s stunning 12-minute hat-trick was the catalyst for Sunday’s 3-2 home win over the runaway Division 1 South leaders who had led 2-0 until the 50th minute.
The victory was Canterbury’s fourth in a row – quite a turnaround given they only won two of their opening 10 matches, one of which was a 7-3 defeat away to Oxted in December. Canterbury have also beaten second-placed Sevenoaks in the last month (3-2 on February 8) and player-coach Boyne believes the club are finally starting to play to their potential. He said: “It was a really satisfying result and it does show that we are good enough to beat anyone on our day.
“We are not famed for our strong starts and Sunday was one of our poorest. “Oxted played well but we were really below our standards, it was a pretty dismal effort and the talk at half-time was about outlining how it was up to us to turn things around.
“We told them ‘you are so much better than you are showing’.
“We needed to do it individually and, as a unit, and what I was really happy about was the fact the players took the criticism the right way, they stepped up and dug in.” Boyne believes Canterbury are a side that generally improve as the season progresses and he thinks they are fully capable of winning their final four games – the first of which is away to bottom club Fareham on Saturday.
Boyne added: “I see no reason why we can’t win all four games and I don’t think we should aim for anything less.
‘We told them ‘you are so much better than you are showing’
“We’ve knocked off some solid teams already, the big test will be Southgate.
“They beat us 8-1 on the opening day so it would be nice to get them back for that.” Canterbury were also due to face Fareham in the Men’s Tier 1 Championship quarter-finals on Sunday but the club have forfeited the tie after opting against travelling to Hampshire twice in as many days. Boyne is set to sit out the league game at Fareham having pulled his hamstring in the dying minutes of the win against Oxted.