The Challenge Cup, now in its seventh year, sees King’s Worcester and RGS Worcester meet for a local end-of-season football derby, this time with a splendid new piece of silverware for the winners. This is one of five different sporting contests between the two schools each year and, with three games now in the bag, King’s Worcester are so far undefeated this season.
King’s got off to a fast start, with both Ollie Tranter and Donal Clason attacking the Grammar School goal from both sides of the pitch. They continued their attacking intent, with Oliver Powell pulling the strings in the middle of the pitch and trying to spread passes through to Hugo Chapman. RGS then started to come back into the game and were dangerous on the counterattack. With the game becoming rather scrappy, the King’s First Team Coach, Andy Holliday made a couple of changes, bringing on Noah DuPont and Zach Mason to try to regain the upper hand, but the teams were very well matched and went into the half-time break with a 0-0 stalemate.
At the beginning of the second half, King’s again started on the front foot, creating a couple of chances on the RGS goal. After some impressive work on the left flank by Ollie Tranter, Oliver Powell provided a perfect assist to set up Noah DuPont, who calmly slotted the ball into the bottom corner of the net from the edge of the box, putting King's into the lead. King’s continued to attack, trying to increase the advantage, but the Grammar School goalkeeper prevented them from doing so with some strong saves. King’s then had a further good chance to double the lead when Todd Pinner connected with a set piece, which was hooked off the line by a combination of the goalkeeper and defender.
As the game went on, RGS continued to launch the ball forward, pushing more players up field, but both Lukas Twiehaus and Todd Pinner were equal to this extra pressure and, along with goalkeeper Jamie Thorp, enabled King’s to keep a clean sheet and bring home the Cup.
Mr Holliday commented, “I am so proud of the efforts of all the King’s players to regain the Cup. What is most rewarding is that so many of the First Team Squad contributed to the victory, and it was great to see so many of them making their debuts in the Challenge Cup.”
The King’s Worcester First XI will continue their quest for double-cup success when they play their County Cup Semi-Final in a couple of weeks, against either Bromsgrove School or Bewdley High School.