DHS romps to victory over Clifton
In an entertaining Hyundai Friday Night Lights match, played at The Coliseum, at Durban High School (DHS), the home team registered an emphatic 4-1 win over Clifton College.
Don’t be fooled by the three-goal winning margin, though. It was a tightly contested clash.
DHS and Clifton are two of the top teams in the KwaZulu-Natal region and it showed in the first exchanges as they traded blows, but none was lethal. There was little to separate them as they finished the first chukka in a 0-0 stalemate.
In the second chukka, DHS’s endeavour was rewarded when they received a penalty stroke for a push in the back inside the circle and Sithsaba Siyoyo had no problem converting it to give his side the lead.
Siyoyo’s strike might not have been DHS’s opener had their captain, Josh Mungherera, not spurned a couple of opportunities. The skipper, however, made amends by smartly slotting DHS’s second shortly after Siyoyo’s goal to lift School into a 2-0 halftime lead.
Clifton, who had asked questions of their own, had been resetting and recovering from Siyoyo’s strike, so the double blow was a gut punch to their efforts.
Keegan Hazlett, the DHS coach, speaking to SuperSport Schools Plus after the match, said his side had shown a weakness of late by tending to drop onto the backfoot after taking a lead, which had allowed opposition teams to come back into the contest. While it happened briefly against Clifton, DHS turned to their solid structure to, once again, set up phases and piled on the pressure, mostly down the flanks.
They were, then, able to increase their lead to three goals when Siyiyo slotted his second, this time from a well-executed penalty corner. Hazlett said Siyoyo had been converting short corners during practice with panache and it was good to have him translate that practice form into the match.
Coach Calvin Pryce’s charges found little joy in the final third of the field as the DHS defence, led well by Bhavesh Naicker and Josh van Biljon, kept them at bay. Eventually, though, Clifton’s persistence was rewarded when Zach Williamson converted a penalty corner in the third chukka.
It wasn’t until the last two minutes of the game that the scoreboard shifted once more, and it was the DHS captain, Josh Mungherera, who rounded off a superb counterattack that covered almost the length of the field. It also had plenty to do with the never-say-die effort of Landa Tose.
“He won the ball at the back, won it again in midfield, went all the way up the right, and made a great pass through to Josh, and Josh tipped it in,” Hezlett described goal number four.
The strike was the final nail in the coffin. Clifton kept making optimistic forays into the DHS half and won themselves a handful of penalty corners, but, having conceded one from the set piece, the Horseflies stood firm and repelled the rest to come away with the win.
RESULTS
1st: DHS 4-1 Clifton; 2nd: DHS 0-0 Clifton; u16A: DHS 6-1 Clifton; u16B: DHS 0-2 Clifton; u16C: DHS 4-1 Clifton; u15D: DHS 12-0 Clifton; u14A: DHS 1-0 Clifton; u14B: DHS 0-3 Clifton; u14C: DHS 2-0 Clifton
