North Down travelled to Cookstown on Saturday in a confident mood following the previous weeks positive result but found the home side a much more difficult challenge and without Phil Wilson, Chris Speers and skipper Ross Linter were no match for the side just relegated from the IHL.<\/p>\n
Cookstown pressed from the start and only some fine goalkeeping from Andy Coates, particularly at short corners, allowed the visitors to keep their goal intact.\u00a0 They broke the deadlock after 10 minutes when Coates was eventually beaten at yet another short corner.\u00a0 Five minutes later a poor clearance allowed them to score a second.\u00a0 North Down slowly got into the game and Josh Gilmore had an effort saved before David Shepherd saw his corner effort hit the post.\u00a0 The home keeper then made a fine save from Gareth McKeown again from a corner.<\/p>\n
Cookstown got the killer goal early in the second period.\u00a0 They grew in confidence and North Down struggled to get any control of the game. The home team then added a fourth 15 minutes into the half again from a corner before Gilmore had a chance to reduce the arrears but his effort was wide.\u00a0 Cookstown had a let off when McKeown gathered a long ball and shot tamely with the goal at his mercy.\u00a0 North Down were running out of steam and Cookstown ran in a further four goals in the last ten minutes to leave the scoreline a somewhat flattering 8-0.<\/p>\n
PMB Man of the Match:\u00a0 Gareth McKeown<\/p>\n
Report by Robbin Mitchell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
North Down travelled to Cookstown on Saturday in a confident mood following the previous weeks positive result but found the home side a much more difficult challenge and without Phil Wilson, Chris Speers and skipper Ross Linter were no match for the side just relegated from the IHL. Cookstown pressed from the start and only…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-match-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northdownhc.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}