Eagles left reeling by opening-day defeat

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Ruislip Eagles’ Michael Vitello has admitted that his team have been given a wake-up call after making a terrible start to their Super8 season.

Last term’s cup finalists, who will be playing in Europe this year and are among the favourites for the domestic title, suffered a shock 12-11 home defeat against Leeds Hornets.

With Hannes Mazur, Jozsef Csontos and the newly promoted Gil Lewis making their league debuts for the Eagles, they struggled to convert their chances and had keeper Stefan Bauer to thank for some fine saves at the other end.

With the score at 11-11 – unusually low for a handball match – the visitors scored with only 20 seconds left, giving them their first victory in London.

Vitello said: “I have never seen, let alone played, a game like this.

“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and we were lacking the sharpies and the edge we needed to get ourselves out of this mess.

“It is early in the season and I guess we needed the wake-up call, but it is hugely disappointing to not secure the points on home turf in the first game of the season.”

Team-mate Tibor Szerencse added: “This is not the start to the season we wanted.

“We will have to carefully analyse what happened here today in order to make sure it will not happen again.”

For their next fixture, the Eagles travel to Chester to face Deva HC.

Team v Leeds: Tibor Szerencze, Stefan Bauer (goalkeepers) – Jozsef Csontos (4 goals), Denis Werner (3), Michael Vitello (2), Hannes Mazur (1), Marc Fayemi (1), Fabien Colette, Lucas Carstens, Gil Lewis
Team Coach: Marc Fayemi
Team Official: Chris Powell  

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