Time for an update on the hockey season: Back in England Camberley have nearly reached the end of their season, in France La Baule haven't yet started the second half of theirs - it's hockey Jim, but not as we know it!
We play home games on grass - the real green stuff - whereas everyone else in the civilised world gave that up in 1990 and plays on artificial ("astroturf") pitches. Actually, apart from the first couple of weeks of the season, we really play on a bumpy, sticky mixture of mud and divots (our pitch is shared by the rugby club). Normally this is worth about two goals a game for us as no-one likes playing on it and all their pre-planned practice drills fail when the ball bobbles all over the place. We don't like it much either but it's the place we call home ....
La Baule started the season in September having convinced ourselves that, based on second place last season, we were going to win the league and get promoted to the unlikely sounding Nationale league 3. This confidence lasted 67 minutes of the first match until we managed to concede our fourth goal to lose 4-3 (having been 3-1 ahead with ten minutes to play). Collective shock provided the spur to a decent run of form after that as we went on a five match winning league and cup run and then, just as we were getting going, the season stopped and the indoor version of the game took over. We had great ambitions indoors and had entered two teams for the first time ever. Due to the great distances involved and some unimaginative scheduling from the league the two teams had to cover 4000km between them to fulfil their fixtures and, possibly unsurprisingly, managed to come bottom of both leagues. That's a long way to travel to lose .... but mostly people seemed to enjoy themselves despite the massive frustration of losing.
I got some good pics of the second indoor team playing.
Outdoor hockey started last weekend with a cup game against Angers II, we'd already beaten them in the league and improbably defeated their first team 8-0 in the previous round (explained in part because they only had eight players including a Czech girl who spoke more English than French). This time Angers II turned out with a number of Angers I players who hadn't been in the eight (we recognised them from indoor). The game got to full-time at 2-2 and after 20 minutes of extra time we were still at 2-2 and so on to penalty strokes and a great example of the French love of rules and regulations - or not. Despite the best efforts of a couple of our players the teams were tied after the first barrage of five strokes and so on to sudden death. That means that the rest of the team take a penalty each until someone goes ahead - or so we thought. Suddenly it was spotted that the player who had just put away Angers seventh (or perhaps eighth, to be honest I'd lost count) had already taken a penalty. Cue a ten minute break whilst everyone argued about what the rules were, what people thought the rules were and what the rules really ought to be. Of course, no-one actually had a copy of the rules .... Eventually the argument was resolved somehow and the competition continued and we came out the winners. Our prize is a home game on our grass/mud pitch but this time we won't have much of an advantage - it's against Entrammes, the only other team in our league who play on grass.
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