The U14 Girls entered the FA Peoples Cup back in January 2017 and today made their debut in the competition, being the first Thatcham Tornadoes team to do so.

Disappointingly only 3 teams actually entered the competition and besides us,Tower Hill Vixens and Oxford City Girls also entered.

As only 3 teams entered, it was decided between the 3 managers and the organiser that we would play 10 minutes each way and play each other twice.
The winners of the group would then progress to the semi finals at another location later in the year.

Tornadoes team:
Caitlin, Grace, Erin, Sophie, Bethany, Annabel and Natasha

The first game was Tower Hill Vixens v Thatcham Tornadoes, which Tornadoes won 6-1 with goals from Grace (3), Sophie (2) and Natasha

The next game up was Oxford City Girls v Tower Hill Vixens and Oxford were a big team and using their physicality, in some cases a little bit to much !

Tornadoes second game was against Oxford City Girls and this ended in a 6-1 defeat with Natasha scoring the only goal.
It became obvious that as Oxford only had 5 Girls, they were being very physical to keep hold of the ball, adjudged unfairly by the referee who had penalised them a lot.

Tornadoes then played Tower Hill Vixens in their 3rd game which was probably the best game of the all of the games.
The score was 3-3 and with all the girls getting extremely tired, it was end to end stuff with Tower Hill scoring right at the end to grab a deserved draw.
Natasha scored 2 and Grace scored the Torndoes goals.

The final game was against Oxford City Girls and this was to become a physical game as Tornadoes had been on the end of some harsh challenges.
To be fair Oxford had come with their best 5 players and at times played some very good football.
Tornadoes lost the game 4-1 with Sophie scoring the Tornadoes goal.
However this time Tornadoes stood up to the Oxford Physicality and give as good as they got which got all the crowd going and showed that girls football can be just as challenging as their male counterparts.

It was great experience for the girls and the BBC had filmed all the games to which highlights will be shown on the BBC sometime during the summer.