Insight Body & Mind Women’s Match Preview: Five Becomes Six? Royals Home for Preston
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Five wins. Twenty-one goals scored in the run, four conceded. A striker on 14 for the season and not slowing down. Whatever was missing from this side’s first seven rounds has been found and refined, and is now being applied with a kind of clinical certainty that has the Royals sitting third on the NPLW Victoria ladder and within striking distance of every team above them.
Preston Lions come to Cross Keys Reserve on Saturday afternoon. They sit eleventh on the table with two wins from ten, a goal difference well into the negative, and a season that has thus far failed to find any sustained rhythm.
However, the Royals know better than anyone that the table only suggests; the football decides.
Last Friday night at Kingston Heath, this side delivered the most complete performance of its season. Seven without reply. Three inside twenty-five minutes. Four by halftime. Kelli McGroarty’s hat-trick took her to 14 goals for the season.
Akeisha Sandhu also found the back of the net. Isabella Sewards, Sasha Coorey and Emma Langley all contributed.
Sophie Dehne kept another clean sheet between the sticks.
The performance was not a one-off. It is what this group has become.
Box Hill United and Boroondara Eagles share top spot on twenty-two points each, with Boroondara holding a game in hand. The Royals trail by one point.
The race is live.
Every fixture from here matters, and home matches against bottom-half opposition are the ones a title-chasing side has to convert. Saturday at Cross Keys is one of those.
This is also, for those keeping track, the longest winning run of the Royals’ 2026 campaign. Five becomes six, or it does not. The home crowd will be in to find out. McGroarty will be looking for fourteen.
The defence will be looking for a fourth clean sheet in five. And the team will be looking to do at home what it has been doing on the road for the past month.