B2H Tournament 3: “Un-Frozen Glory”

The much anticipated T3 was almost upon us. Unfortunately so was the year’s first serious threat of frosts taking out an entire weekend of hockey games. Many training sessions were cancelled in the week preceding and many questions and comments were being bandied about if we would even get to play a single game.

Luckily for us we had our resident Spy-Master / Groundsman Mark Waller & his team to sort out the pitches. Special salt was laid late on Friday night by a balaclava’d Mark and whilst most of us were just beginning to enjoy our morning coffee in a warm kitchen on Saturday morning Mark, once again, was instead on the job in the freezing cold brushing the pitches in preparation for the weekend’s games.

This week we were joined again by our friends from Epsom HC and London Royals HC who had traveled all the way from East London to reach us. Games were played with the temperature bouncing between -2C and +2C… Sarah (captain of the SHC Dragons) subbed herself off the pitch in the first game and looked like her child had attacked her with a blue marker pen! Her lips were blue, her ears were blue, she didn’t even know if she still had any fingers or a stick as they were all numb. Luckily a quick phone call was put into Sarah’s husband and some warmer attire was found and donned.

The rest of the tournament was mostly about warmth management. After de-thawing both Sarah and Garry blazed a trail and scored four each. Louise, Pete and Josh were hot on their heels scoring two each whilst Roger, Matt, Kit, Sam and Hugh bagged one each.

B2H would like to thank Giles for umpiring all the games which wasn’t easy in near freezing conditions and Mark for enabling us to be able to play at all whilst most other clubs’ pitches around the area were frozen.

The next B2H tournament is on Saturday 13th of January. See you all on the pitch!