The start was terrible and the finish was great.
From a results perspective, that sums up Southern United’s national women’s premiership season.
Looking a bit deeper, it was not quite that simple.
The way the draw worked, it was always going to be a rough start and a better ending.
Despite that, a fourth-place finish remains respectable.
It ended with a 3-2 win over Central in Palmerston North on Sunday, its second win in as many weeks.
It was also its second of the season. That followed four losses to open with, a run in which it netted just one goal.
Certainly it was a tough start and it would have been easy to lose confidence and crumble completely.
But the team did well to finish with a pair of wins, which included five goals.
Both the good and the bad were somewhat influenced by the draw.
Southern’s first run of opponents — Canterbury United, Capital and Northern — ended up as the top three teams in order.
Auckland followed and, while it finished sixth, that was due to losing points because of an administration error, not because it was not a quality side.
Capital is the only one of those teams Southern has beaten since 2017 — when it beat all three of the others on the way to the playoffs.
Conversely, it has not lost to either Central or WaiBOP in that time, both of which it beat.
In that sense, the season went largely as expected. It won the games it was expected to.
Capital has been a game that could go either way in recent years.
The other three have been slightly ahead.
Perhaps it was more the way the losses happened that disappointed.
It conceded 15 goals in its first four games, while Sammy Murrell’s consolation effort late against Canterbury was its only one in that stretch.
Enough chances were created but it just could not put them away.
The number of changes in this year’s team made things tough early, too.
It usually takes a month for teams to start firing and that was made tougher by the number of new players.
Adding the likes of Murrell, Macey Fraser, Rose Morton, Blair Currie, Toni Power, Tessa Nicol and Kate Guildford made up for some key losses in a quality sense.
However, from a team chemistry perspective it can take a while to click and perhaps that showed, too.
Murrell was awarded the players’ player of the year at Monday’s awards. Defender Hannah Mackay-Wright picked up coaches’ player of the year.
Young striker Amy Hislop showed her goal-scoring prowess late in the season. She won golden boot as she bagged three goals in the final two games, moving to 10 in her national league career.
Tahlia Roome won young breakthrough player of the year.
Canterbury will host Capital in the final at 1pm on Sunday.
