Mens

Preparation for this year’s tournament began in April with weekly trainings at both Christchurch Boy’s High and St Margaret’s hockey turfs and concluded with two practice games against the Canterbury Under 18A and Under 18B Men’s teams.

The outcomes from the trainings and warm up games were positive and put us in a good position of achieving our goal of winning the B section but more importantly gaining promotion back into the A section.
As with previous years, our team consisted with a core group of players from Christchurch as well as players outside the area from Dunedin, Wellington, North Harbour and even Brisbane.
The first day of tournament was disruptive due to the weather conditions. This caused one of the turfs to flood and delayed the start of our first game.
After some scheduling changes by NZISA our QBT campaign finally began with our first pool game against North Harbour B. We had the best start possible to the match by scoring in the first minute. We continued to score frequently throughout the game and the final score finished up being 14 – nil to us. Even though it was a high scoring game, we were more pleased that we denied the opposition any chance to score against us.
Having such a solid start to tournament, we set ourselves standards that we had to maintain or better with our remaining games.
Our second pool game was against Bay of Plenty and we knew this would be tough after the heavy defeat we had against them at last year’s QBT in Palmerston North.
We started the game as we finished the previous game by scoring early on and found ourselves 2 – nil up part way through the first half. However, we went to sleep and let them back into the game earlier in the second half where they scored. That sparked us into action and we continued our goal scoring form, winning the second game 5 – 2.
As we finished top our pool with two wins, the next day we had our semi final against Waikato. The last time we played Waikato in Wellington was for the Dhyan Chand Trophy. Again like the previous two games we started well and we were up 2 – nil at half time. We should have sealed the game in the second half, but could not do so with a couple of missed opportunities. However, the half time score stayed the same and we qualified for the final.
Our opposition in the final was against Auckland B who had a mixture of young talented players and some experienced older players. Clearly the toughest game of the tournament, we did not have the time or space to create heaps of goal scoring opportunities as we did in our earlier games. This showed with the half time score being nil all.
Ten minutes into the second half we managed to score to go 1 – nil up. The remainder of the half our defence played exceptionally well to defuse any attacks Auckland generated and we hung on to win the B final section.
With this win we achieved our goal of getting back into the A section. This was due to the effort and commitment put in by all the players prior to and at QBT as well as the work put in by team management. Thanks must go to coach Dev Menon and player – manager Dharmesh Budhia.
Congratulations to Rajeev Bhana, Pranil Bhikha, Uneal Dheda, Sunjay Ganda, Shashil Govind, Mitch Hayde and Yanosh Irani for making the NZISA B Section Tournament team. Further congratulations must also go to Pranil for being announced team MVP.
CISC 2010 Team: Rajeev Bhana, Divyesh Bhavan Pranil Bhikha, Dharmesh Budhia, Jitendra Chhagan, Uneal Dheda, Minesh Fakir, Sunjay Ganda, Shashil Govind, Mitch Hayde, Yanosh Irani, Prashil Lallu, Preetesh Morar, Dipak Patel, Shivum Patel, Hitesh Ravji
Results
CISC 14 NHISC 0
CISC 5 BOP ISC 2
Semi Final
CISC 2 Waikato ISC 0
Final
CISC 1 AISC B 0