Tournament blog

To Frankfurt and back

We targeted last weekend as a major milestone in the build up to the championships. We planned, prepared and got ready for our test event matches against Germany; of course we forgot to account for the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull.

Travelling down to Hereford on Thursday morning and listening to Five Live it was only a matter of time before I got the inevitable phone call from Germany saying that their flight had been cancelled.

When the call came I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude of the German Federation who immediately put together a contingency plan to get the team to England. I did say that logically it would be easier to stay at home and rearrange the games but there was no time for logic and Germany were adamant that they wanted to come.

As a sub plot to this one of their players had a fear of flying and had already set off for England by train before the flight was cancelled.

So as the day developed things became more complicated. We had a blind German footballer travelling alone, with no guide, on a train, due to arrive into Birmingham International Train Station. We had the team travelling by bus and ferry due to arrive in the middle of the night into London (that’s another story) with their manager that spoke perfect English having lost his mobile phone.

Amazingly after over 24 hours the team arrived in the early afternoon into Hereford, jaded, tired but up for a game of Football.

The game on Friday night behind closed doors really reflected everything that had happened. It was exciting and explosive to begin with but petered out into a low key and hackneyed game.

By Saturday, the sun was shining in Hereford and everything felt more upbeat. As the crowd arrived and we built up to the game everything slotted in place.

The game was amazing. Jon Gribbin was outstanding and how the score was only 2-0 was incredible and very much down to bad luck and the German goalkeeper. The players really seemed to appreciate the atmosphere and music. The crowd got just a small taste of what August will be like and all in all it was quite exciting.

So the really difficult bit was then getting the German team home. Trying to make travel arrangements late on Saturday afternoon when the travel agents office had closed was messy to say the least.

Eventually we had to send the team to the airport on Sunday morning pretty much knowing that they would have no where to go. After a few frustrating hours they managed to charter an Austrian bus and arrived back in Frankfurt on Tuesday evening.

It was an incredible weekend made more special by the trip that Germany had made both ways.

So we move on, now for the risk assessment on volcanic eruptions.

Posted by Jon Dutton on 22-04-2010

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