IT WAS an eventful weekend for Bury Hockey Club as all hockey action has now been suspended at the club due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The men’s second team secured the Division Four championship with a 4-2 victory over City of Manchester.
Bury’s ladies first team were involved in a double header against City of Manchester - losing the league match on Saturday, but they made up for that with a 2-1 win on Sunday in the semi-final to progress to their second cup final of the campaign.
On Saturday Bury went 2-1 up against the league leaders via a tremendous deflected finish from Lorna Wroe and Heledd Rimmer securing a rebound from her first attempt that had hit the post.
However, CoM turned the game on its head in 12 second half minutes to go 3-2 up and take the wind out of Bury’s sails.
With five minutes remaining they added the gloss with a well worked team goal.
The Ladies got their revenge on Sunday however, as their powers of recovery proved superior to CoM’s.
Emma Bailey got Bury on their way with her trademark thunderbolt from a penalty corner as CoM were slow to run out. Livvy Barber got Bury’s second as Bury were dominating the game thanks in part to a controlling performance in midfield from her sister Poppy Barber.
CoM got a consolation but Bury gained their revenge and are now into their second cup final of the season, whenever that may be played.
A win over CoM landed the men’s second team the title as both sides were neck and neck in the table going into this but it was CoM who took the lead within the first three minutes.
A basic ball through was mis-trapped and found its way to the forward who finished past Howard in goal.
However, Bury fired back with goals from man of the match Mike Letki and Ricky Aspinall.
Just before half-time, an unfortunate deflection from Tariq Sheikh wrong footed Howard and the ball was tapped home on the line.
Bury came out fired up in the second half and took the lead through Letki’s second.
A tense 25 minutes played out as Bury defended and attacked in equal parts, with Danny Nicholls, Jon Kitchen and Luke Fidler being the chief tormentors of the CoM defence.
With the final hit of the game, Luke Fidler slammed home a penalty corner to score Bury’s fourth and send Sameer Sheikh’s men off in wild celebration of securing the title to top off a rather spectacular season.
The men’s first team were beaten 1-0 in their match against CoM on Saturday in what was their last game of the season.
With not much to play for this was always a difficult game to get in the right mind set for and it was petering out until an unlucky deflection off Rob Bradburn at a penalty corner gave Manchester the only goal of the game.
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