Hockey One Men After Round 4: Melbourne Clear at the Top, Three Teams Tied on Nine, Adelaide Still Winless
Four rounds down, and the men’s Hockey One table has a clear leader and a proper traffic jam behind him.
HC Melbourne sit top on 12 points from four wins, and nobody else is perfect anymore. The back-to-back champions have scored 28 goals and conceded 12, and Nathan Ephraums leads the whole competition with 10 goals. That’s not a team scraping wins. That’s a team setting the pace.
Then it gets crowded. Tassie Tigers, Canberra Chill and NSW Pride are all on nine points, three wins and one loss each. The Tigers have the best goal difference of the three, plus 12, after their 4-1 win over Brisbane Blaze in Hobart on Saturday. Canberra’s is plus 3, and the Pride’s is plus 2, but points are points, and all three are right in the fight for the top four.
Govers just keeps scoring
Blake Govers is the quiet story of the round. His 35th-minute penalty corner was the only goal as NSW Pride ground out a 1-0 win at Adelaide Fire on Saturday night, and it means he’s now scored in all four Pride games this season. A goal in every game, in a league this tight, is worth its weight in gold. The Pride don’t always win pretty, but with Govers scoring like this, they don’t need to.
Perth Thundersticks are next on six points after Sunday’s 6-3 home win over the Melbourne Cobras, and Brisbane Blaze sit on three after that Hobart defeat. At the bottom, it’s grim reading for two clubs. The Cobras have lost all four, and Adelaide Fire have lost all four too, scoring just three goals and conceding 29. The Fire’s goal difference is minus 26. That’s not a bad run, that’s a season in trouble.
What Round 5 brings
Round 5 is where this table starts to sort itself out. On Friday 6 November, HC Melbourne host the Tassie Tigers in the Grand Final rematch in Melbourne. Win that, and the champions open up real daylight. On Saturday 7 November, NSW Pride host Canberra Chill in Sydney, which is a straight fight for position in that three-way tie, while Perth host Brisbane Blaze. And on Sunday 8 November, the Cobras host Adelaide Fire in Bendigo, a game neither side can afford to lose.
For our money, Melbourne are still the team to catch, but that chasing pack is too good for this to stay a procession. One bad weekend for the champions and suddenly three teams are breathing down their necks.
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