Belgium down, Hurling up

European Hurling came alive again on Saturday as Belgium was knocked from its perch and The Hague claimed the first tournament of the season at their home grounds.

Whether some decide to interpret it as arrogance or otherwise, the fact (which was backed up by results) was that a big gap had developed between us and the others. Winning alone does not motivate people and we've had a big struggle keeping guys interested due to an uncompetitive standard and the travel requirements and costs we face as a dual club. Numbers have been poor at training and as a result Saturday's performance was no surprise to some of us at least. We could see it hurtling down the tracks towards us even as far back as last summer.

We struggled in our first game against Lux and traded points evenly until mid-way through the second half when Colm and Shane put some distance between the sides. It was a scrappy game, as is often the case when two teams step out of their cars after hours on the road. I find it ridiculous that Den Hague and Zurich, both of whom were there on Friday night, were not down to play first. We had gathered at 06h50 at Schuman whilst Lux would have been up a lot earlier. This happens time and again at tournaments and would be a simple adjustment to make in the schedule and much appreciated by travelling players.

We faced The Hague next. Back in December, at the Hurling workshop during the County Convention, Sean Simpson had been saying they would give more focus to hurling this year. It proved to be the case as they looked a well balanced outfit. They cleared ball with greater ease and picked off their scores more efficiently also. On the other hand, we wasted a glut of goal chances and I contributed to the wide tally with a host of wayward frees. We lost out by two points but based on our performance, it could have / should have been more.

This left us in a tricky situation as we now had to beat Zurich and then hope points difference would go in our favour as ourselves, Zurich and The Hague would likely finish the group games on 6pts a piece. Zurich had a couple of great goal chances but a combination of Hielers reactions in goal and some last ditch defending, kept the green flag in its place. We trailed by a point at half-time but Ryano and Hough began to step up in the second half and we quickly took the lead. Zurich were in fine fettle though and regained the lead as the game entered its last moments. Enter Michael Hough. Anonymous for most of the day, he stepped up big time and had a lot of groundwork to do before he buried the winning goal to the back of the net.

The points difference didn't go our way in the end and that left us to playoff against Luxembourg for third place. We won it convincingly. Notable performance in this game came from Ciaran Kelly who won a host of first time ball.

In the final, The Hague reversed their defeat from earlier in the day against Zurich to claim victory after extra-time.

Naturally, we returned home frustrated and disappointed. In fairness, there wasn't much blame floating around as most guys felt they personally were not up to scratch on the day. For me, I could make a fairly long list of costly mistakes I made. My judgement was way out and that was also seen in my free taking which was cat. I can't remember playing so badly in a tournament and so much of it was down to personal errors rather than being taken to the cleaners by my opposing marker.

During The Hague game, I nearly had myself convinced to pack it in. I could barely move and that killed the confidence. It's a funny thing. You've been a situation a thousand times and know you've come out on top before but when the confidence is down, you no longer have control over the outcome.

There was one positive realisation though. Hurling is competitive again. Bar Lux who were missing a few, there was only a puck of a ball in every other game. We all want to win but we want to earn our wins. This year is shaping up to be a right ding dong battle and whoever is crowned champion at the end will certainly have earned it.

We have three weeks now to Budapest and that will be a tough trip given the distance. We needed big performances in The Hague and Belgium because we can't rely on numbers for Budapest and Zurich. Guys were saying all the right things on Saturday evening but we will have to wait and see whether that will be translated into effort in the coming weeks.

In the ladies competition, our Ladies finished much stronger than ourselves and after squeezing out of their group, they defeated Paris (who won all their group games) in the final. The standard of their competition was also notably higher with a lot more experienced camogie players on show than in the past.