John Mitchells, Birmingham Visit Brussels

John Mitchells of Birmingham visited Brussels this weekend. It was a bit of a strange one. We’ve known they were coming for months but because it came three months after the end of the season it didn’t really come onto the radar.

The danger in such situation was that we may not have a team but in fairness to Adrian and Martin they rallied the troops and we got to around 13 players. I sat out due to injury and was joined on the absent list by such luminaries as The Gooch (ya, he plays hurling too!), Pearce, Daire Cott, Conor Magner, Keary and a host of others.
Most impressive was the appearance of Michael Hough. Back in the first team of FC Irlande, he told them he was unavailable and so dropped to the seconds who were playing later. The game was due to start at 11 so we were there at half 10. They arrived at 12h15 which was extremely inconvenient for most of our team who had soccer matches and kids birthdays to attend.

Now, I fully appreciate that they were over for a session and in fairness they were all sound enough lads. However, they took the p1ss a bit too much during the game, taking off their shirts and waving them in the air when they scored and that sort of craic.

Anyway, we led at half-time mainly through the scoring prowess of Sheanon, Hough and debutant Gearoid. However, with numerous half-time departures for aforementioned reasons, Martin had to make some adjustments. One was to put me in goal.
We conceded one in the first half and five in the second half. Ouch. The usual question is ‘how many were your fault?’. More appropriate question is probably how many I could have saved. In that case, I probably could have saved them all. Bit of a disaster.

In the end we lost 6-11 to 3-9. Not a disgraceful result considering we started understrength and finished further understrength. There was also a camogie game but I had to depart shortly after that started. Reports suggest it went a similar way to the hurling. The whole thing wasn’t quite a waste of time but whether we accept such teams requests to visit so far beyond the end of season should probably be considered in the future.