Sunday 15th December 2024 – WNIHL North Cup: Widnes Wild Women 2 – Sheffield Shadows 10 
Cath Thornton made her debut
for the Wild Women
(photo by Scott Dutton)
The Widnes Wild women’s team had a difficult start to their WNIHL North Cup campaign with a rather unexpected 2-10 defeat at home to Sheffield Shadows at Planet Ice Widnes on Sunday.
When the two teams met in the league earlier in the season away at iceSheffield, the game had finished in a very close 1-2 win for the Wild, so this result was rather unexpected.
This is the first year that the WNIHL has run a separate cup alongside the league competition and it has been introduced for this season to make up the number of games after the Grimsby team withdrew from this season’s WNIHL Division 2 North. Alongside their league meetings, Widnes are playing Sheffield and Telford once home and once away in a three team “round robin” cup group that will decide an overall winner. A separate cup competition also sees Leeds, Kingston and Caledonia meeting in a similar format.
Sheffield came out of the blocks the quickest and took the lead after just 3 minutes. They doubled their advantage three minutes later and Widnes had to wait until the 14th minute to open their own account with a goal from Katie Fairclough. The score stood at a fairly manageable 1-2 to Sheffield at the first period break with both sides very much in contention.
Two more goals early in the second period saw the Shadows edge further ahead but Fairclough found the back of the net once again to bring the score to 2-4 at the second interval.
Widnes still looked in with a shout at this point but the floodgates opened up in the third period as Sheffield outshot the Wild Women by a massive 24 to 5 and their effort were duly rewarded. 6 unanswered goals swept past overworked netminder Stephanie Drinkwater in the final 20 minutes of play, helping Sheffield to a higher margin of victory than the Wild performance possibly deserved.
The Wild Women have a few weeks’ break now to lick their wounds and regroup before the season restarts in January. They travel to Telford to face the Wrekin Raiders on Sunday12th January and are next at home on Sunday 26th January when they take on the same opposition at Planet Ice Widnes, 4.25pm face off.
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Sunday’s game saw a Widnes debut for recent signing Cath Thornton. Cath may be a new face to Widnes fans but she played league ice hockey for the Deeside-based Flintshire Furies – alongside fellow Wild women Catherine Fell and Vanessa Crickmore-Clarke - for four seasons from 2005 to 2010, scoring 7 goals and 4 assists in 48 competitive matches. She has most recently been playing for the Connah’s Quay Cobras recreational team at Deeside.
Thornton was named MVP for the Wild Women in her first game at Widnes.
