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The initial reasons for travelling away to Europe was , to increase the amount of quality games the Irish team would get in a season, to increase the frequency of the visits to allow for correct benchmarking in terms of what advancements are being made. Infrequent visits with longer gaps doesn't allow for noticeable improvements regardless of results. However the system of semesterisation has curtailed the possibility of many players travelling. We travelled with 11 players. 4 of these were under 18 : Jason Germaine, Alex Kulesh , Mogue Cunningham and Steve Bartley. Of the senior members of the panel only Ciaran and Oisin O'Brannagain, Paul Gray and goalkeeper Benny O'Reagan had played in CT09. Hichem Sefroun is returning to the team, Senad Kurjak is returning after 6 months absence due to family reasons and George Clancy is at University in England and cannot train with a team. Suffice to say this team had never played together before. Next year early January may be seen as a poor time to travel , albeit it suits European teams. The trip to Ghent was organised as a 5 team tournament with good gaps between matches. However due to the bad weather conditions one team did not turn up and so Ireland had to play back to back matches on both days. The first day was a match against a 2nd division Belgian team "Tournai" . Ireland was defeated 41-26 a score that does not reflect the result a full squad would have achieved. The team was only beginning to play together coming toward the end of the 1st half and performed incredibly well. All 4 U-18 players played some of the game. After a warm down, stretch and team talk Ireland was requested to play the next game immediately against a french 2nd division team, Hasebrouck. The score after 10 minutes was 8-8 with all our U-18 players playing the entire first half and 10 minutes of the second half due to the exertions of the seniors in the 1st game. The final 20 minutes with our complement of seniors on the court saw us score 11-14. Final score 45-19  On Sunday we faced the U-19 team of hosts Don Bosco . We played the entire game with all our U-18 boys on the court. They played extremely well . Hichem played 10 minutes of the entire game as did Oisin , George Clancy played almost the entire game at centre. Ireland lost the game 29-27 having come back from an 8 goal deficit. Our final game against the senior Don Bosco team was played immediately after, and our boys lost by their largest score 39-16. the second half of this game saw us beat the Belgian team in the opening 15 minutes but injuries to our two jump shooters saw our efficiency in front of goal depleted and the Belgians beat us easily. Tom Brannagan. |
