Dalefield women's hockey coach Kim Henson wasn't waxing lyrical about his team's 8-2 win over Harbour City-Tawa in their Wellington premier division match at Clareville on Saturday.
Henson was delighted to see his side bounce back to winning form after suffering a hefty defeat at the hands of Eastern Hutt the
previous weekend, but he conceded they played no better than they had to in beating a depleted Harbour City-Tawa side, which sits at the bottom of the points table.
"It was a good enough effort but quite honestly we'll have to do better if we are to win the competition," he said. "We still need to get more intensity into our game, we're just not sharp enough yet."
Substitute Alice Davies had a strong game for Dalefield, coming off the bench to score two well-taken goals.
The Dalefield men might have lost their Wellington premier division match, also played at Clareville, to Northern United 1-0 but they gave the competition leaders a big fright. It was a substantial improvement on the nine-goal drubbing they had taken from Victoria University the weekend before with coach Craig Nielsen "absolutely thrilled" with their application and commitment.
"It was a huge step up from the previous game, you couldn't really compare the two," he said.
Nielsen said the experiment of playing a 3-3-4 formation had worked well for Dalefield with Northern United struggling to make any headway against a tenacious defence.
In fact, it wasn't until 15 minutes from fulltime that they managed to score the only goal of the game and it was Dalefield who called the tune over the closing stages.
"We really came at them over the last 10 minutes and had a couple of good chances to equalise ," Nielsen said. "There were just hanging on in the end.".
