Bathurst Panther Jess Hotham named best on ground in Group 10 league tag grand final

TWO weeks ago grand final day wasn’t so kind to Jess Hotham.

She had been one of the driving forces behind Bathurst City’s push to the big day in women’s Premier League Hockey where they took on Lithgow Panthers.

Unfortunately that day things didn’t fall into place for Hotham and her team-mates, and they suffered a 4-2 loss.

It was a different story on Sunday at Sid Kallas Oval in Cowra as she spearheaded Bathurst Panthers’ push towards a second straight Group 10 women’s league tag premiership.

Hotham was an obvious standout during the match, laying on a couple of tries and scoring another. Accordingly she was given the player of the match award after her side won 24-12.

A foundation member of the side since they first began playing occasional exhibition matches against St Pat’s four years ago, she has been a consistent match winner since the competition proper began in 2012.

“This definitely makes up for the loss a couple of weeks ago,” Hotham said.

“It would have been pretty tough to take two grand final losses, but thankfully it didn’t happen.

“I didn’t really know whether I’d played that well or not, it felt like all I was doing was defending for a lot of the game.

“To win a grand final everyone has to do their job not just one or two people, and we all did it today I think.”

Early in the game it looked like St Pat’s had come out slightly more ready to play. As such, the Saints scored first and had a couple of half-chances to add to it.

Errors were costly though and gave Panthers the opportunity to work the ball out of their own end.

The story was similar in the second half as the Saints once more started the stronger of the two sides, but again some mistakes gave Panthers the opportunity to steady and get the ball back to the middle of the field.

The game also evened up in both halves as Panthers captain Monique Christie-Johnson began to find her range in terms of kicking in general play. 

“I think nerves probably got the better of us initially, but we settled into it as the game went on. They definitely started a lot better than we did,” Hotham admitted.

“This win is huge for us, especially having only lost once in two years.

“Half these girls hadn’t played even touch footy when they started, there were a lot of things we had to work on.

“The fact that we’ve been able to improve comes back to having Dave Elvy coaching us, he’s so good at training everyone and teaching them exactly what their role is.”