Hello all – here’s my Olympic Hockey Blog for this month

Selection for the Olympic qualifier was on Saturday 2nd February at Bisham Abbey following our training camp.  Each player was allocated a time slot to meet with the coaching staff, where they would find out our fate. 

I was nervous going into the meeting, but delighted to find out that I had been picked for the tournament, even with my injury problems.

The following weekend we had matches against Poland at Reading and Bisham Abbey.  Unfortunately I picked up a slight quad strain, which limited my time in the first game to 15mins and kept me out of the second game all together.  We won the games convincingly 3-1 and 6-0.

We left for Chile and the Olympic Qualifiers on Feb 15th via London and Madrid on Iberia airlines (not an airline I’ll fly with by choice in the future).

In order to acclimatise, get used to the pitch, and maintain our fitness, the first week was a hard training camp, finishing with a friendly v Chile on the tournament pitch.  With my quad better this was an opportunity for me to prove my fitness for the tournament. 

I worked hard over the training camp and played the majority of the match against Chile (a poor team performance where we scraped a 1-0 win, thanks to an Ashley Jackson strike). 

However, the coaching staff felt that I had not obtained the appropriate match fitness and I was therefore deselected from the Olympic Qualifying tournament on Sat 23rd Feb.

I’m absolutely gutted and am now flying home on March 1st and will have to watch out for tournament results from home, with qualification completely out with my control.

I would like to wish all the squad good luck for the tournament.

Graham

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