Mission Accomplished

Mission accomplished. The simple words from Crusher's text that summed up this weekends visit to Maastricht. Enthusiasm wasn't something which ran through most lads with much vigour about this journey but the victory is one worth its place on the trophy shelf down in de Valera's.

We travelled under the helm of Colin Byrne and Olof Gill and they assembled a formidable panel during the previous week. Corkman Andrew, who hails from the same school as myself, was joined by Kerryman man Mike and Meath native Pat Barrett on the debutant list. Also making its debut was the 15-a-side format, on Maastricht's magnificent full sized artificial G.A.A. pitch. Diarmuid Laffan captained the side in his last tournament for the club, albeit, only thanks to the fact that his phone battery didn't fall out after he threw it at a wall on Friday night at 5am.

The opposition came in the form of Holland (Den Hague, Amsterdam and Maastricht combo) and Lux, who I think may have had some Frankfurt lads. The details I have are sketchy, mostly coming from a phone call with Al on Saturday that was disrupted by the wind. It seems the lads accounted for Holland handily enough and then got past Lux in a much tighter affair. That set-up a final against Lux over two thirty minute halves. Alan sounded nervous just after half time when we were a goal up but under savage pressure.

At that point, Timmy was brought out as an extra midfielder and it was the move that swung the match by all accounts. A couple of goals from Andrew and Mike further bolstered the lead and in the end, the score read something like 4-9 to 2-5. It is a good boost ahead of Munich and completes a successful summer under difficult circumstances. The near two month gap in the season was well managed via the intra-club league and varying the training.

August will be a disrupted month in terms of holidays but will continue to train ahead of Munich. Hopefully, the weekends result will encourage a few more to sign up as we will again be missing a few. Things have been a bit flat in the last couple of weeks so we need to ramp up again. A poor Pan-Euro Championship performance would tarnish what has been a very successful year so far. We can expect competition to be high with Paris, Budapest and possibly some Scandinavian teams supplementing the challenges of Den Hague and Luxembourg. Time to get cracking.