Women's Day Four: More wins please!

Up again at the crack of dawn, and the early starts were beginning to take their toll, and becoming that little bit harder now that the excitement was wearing off a bit. It was time for the last game of our group, against the Latvians. They had lost all of their games to that day, so we were pretty confident that we could beat them and quite solidly. We started off strongly and began to get some points on the scoreboard. However, they were a better team than we had an anticipated, with some very good hands, grabbing stuff out of the air that hadn’t necessarily been thrown the best. Still, they also had a high turnover rate, and we were able to monopolise on this, taking the half by 4 points, if not more. After the break, we came back in, and luckily weren’t having too much trouble scoring our O points, but again they were getting a lot of high break throws off that felt frustratingly hard to stop. Luckily though we had the legs on them, and so we could out run them and take advantage of any turns they did end up making. In the end it was a pretty convincing 17-9 win, not without it’s hairy moments though!

With the group games over, it was time to face another fault with the women’s schedule: no crossovers. Having only won two games in our original pool, we were left in the bottom 6 pool with result carrying over, meaning that we were to still play France, Russia and Austria, before a final placing game. This was to be pretty frustrating, especially when we noticed the performances of some of the teams from the other pool (GB beating Netherlands 17-5,who we also beat in Brugge, and the Swiss ending up in third place) and will be something I will be bringing to the attention of the organisers.

Onwards and upwards though, and our first game of the bottom half saw us face the French, who were top of the bottom half of their group as well. We started off trading points, and then a dropped pull on their part led to a key score, or so we thought. Following that we then got another D point, and things started to really come together. Their heads were down, and we were really at the top of our game. We continued to push out the Ds (even a contested Callaghan from Sinead couldn't hold us back), were playing better offence than we had all week, and we were duly rewarded with a fine win over a team that had completely demolished us in Brugge. 17-9 to the Greens! Brilliant stuff!

MVP of the day: Sinead O’Sheil Flemming