Roller Hockey Photos

The Ladies team made history by finishing on the podium in 3rd place for the Ladies Under 19 European Championships, which was held in Mealhada, Portugal from 3rd – 5th September.

I am very pleased with the achievement of our team in this competition beating Germany 3-2 for 3rd places, considering we lost 6-3 in the group stages earlier, this result was an excellent reaction from our team.

On Saturday morning we played Spain, the eventual winners for 4th time in the row, and we lost 8-0.
I decided to use a rotation system in this game to ensure the players would not be too tired for our evening game.
Spain scored 2 goals in the first 5 minutes and although we defended well, we couldn’t make many counter attacks. Our main problem was the lack of actual ball possession as well as a lot of inexperience from some of the newer players.

After the game against Spain we returned to the hotel to eat and then for a rest. We left for the sports centre so that we had a time for tactical meeting on how to play Germany and assessing the mistakes that cost us the 6 goals against Spain. The girls were well motivated for this game as they knew this would be a fantastic opportunity to make history for our sport.

The team started on the rink very confidently with individual restricted pressure on the player with the ball, mainly the German captain, and this worked very well with our team scoring 3 goals before Germany then scored 1 goal just before half time (3-1).

The second half was a brilliant performance from the girls, showing a lot of passion to keep the score line in their favour and to combat a lot pressure that German team put upon us.

The final 3-2 result was well deserved by the team, as we prepared for this game very well after discussing what went wrong in our first encounter.

I am very proud of the girls regarding this 3rd place which I hope can motivate English roller hockey more to improve, even more specially the girls. Also, I would like to say that this team were excellent off the rink. We have made the right decision to take the team 3 days earlier to Feira for preparation having 5 sessions and 2 friendly games which helped to put the tactics in place and to build up team spirit off the rink.
Goal Scorers: Emma Gillett (2 goals) and Beth Cook

Carlos Amaral