A busy weekend for our Citizens!

Edinburgh City have had a jam packed weekend and we’ll try and give you all of the details that saw the club travel to Glasgow for a beginner’s tournament, training hard across the weekend with the Scotland squad and also having our big bowling social on Saturday evening.

 

Beginner Tournament

Ella Paul took a group of players to Glasgow’s beginner tournament and, except for the help of Laura Powell, all of the squad had been playing korfball for a year or less! A fantastic achievement for the club to be able to field a squad full of newbies.

The format of the tournament was two pool groups and short 10 minute matches. The team played 5 group matches, winning 3 of them but finishing 4^th in the group after the top 3 in the group all took wins from each other. A placing game against Dundee saw a narrow 2-1 defeat before facing Glasgow to play off for 7/8^th position. An exciting game ended with Glasgow equalising late on to force a penalty shootout but City stayed calm and Adam Hardy scored the winning penalty to leave the team finishing 7^th out of 11 teams competing and winning 4 out of their 7 matches on the day!

Ella said of the day “The team showed real improvement throughout the day and were asking lots of great questions, making the most of an opportunity to learn in a less competitive environment. John McDowell scored a great runner, Jiayi Liu showed fantastic hustle and Alex and Adam really fought hard in the rebound position.”

Ella also thanked Adam and Laura who stepped up to referee some matches at the tournament too.

The day say playing debuts for Anj Gopalan and Matthew Walker and we look forward to seeing how all of our fantastic beginners get on this season!

Full squad: Adam Hardy, Alex Foster, Anj Gopalan, Anna Thomas, Dimitris Kalentakis, Emma Steel, Jiayi Liu, John McDowell, Laura Kitchen, Laura Powell, Matthew Cook, Matthew Walker.

 

Bowling Social

A great event put on by our social secretaries Christie Smillie and Laura de Nooij saw the club travel out to World of Bowling for some fun, and not at all competitive bowling action!

As well as strikes, spares and plenty of gutter balls, there was also competitions for the highest team and individual scores as well as the most coveted “best socks” award. Matthew Walker got an honourable mention for wearing his lipstick socks over his trousers all evening, but the judging panel decided that they couldn’t choose between Jacky Mo’s Christmas Darth Vader ensemble or Kitty Dutton’s artistic Mona Lisa socks. So it was put to a public vote and whoever got the loudest cheers would be crowned. Causing quite the commotion, the club voted Kitty as the winner of the inaugural sock award whilst Matthew Cook picked up the best individual score with a massive 149 points.

After the bowling, many of the club headed on to Adam Hardy’s housewarming party where we helped him discover his very own Darth Vader merchandise and hopefully helped to warm his lovely new flat appropriately!

 

Scotland Training

New Scotland coach Colin Boys was up this weekend to take charge of his first Scotland training sessions and it was a great chance for our Citizens to receive some top level coaching as well as try to impress Colin ahead of next year’s European Championships. It was great to have so many representing the club at the training weekend with Dan Pratt, Laura de Nooij, Dave Ewing, Michael Garbutt, Katrina Caldwell, Jacky Mo, Heather Mackintosh, Andrew Goode and Kitty Dutton all joining in.

 

Europa Cup reflections

Last weekend saw ECKC enter the qualification round for the Europa Cup, korfball’s most prodigious club competition.  I couldn’t have asked for a better group of players to go with, the spirit within the playing squad was fantastic and I was delighted that Graham Robertson had agreed to come along as part of the coaching team. His input was invaluable and meant that I could focus mainly on playing rather than coaching whilst on-court.

Our first match was against the French champions Bonson, this was a crucial one as the other teams in our group were viewed as overwhelming favourites to qualify before the tournament started.

Unfortunately for us we made a few too many errors during the game and despite a strong fight towards the end of the match it wasn’t enough to close the gap with the final score 15-12 in favour of the French side.

The next match was against the Hungarian side Szentendrei and on paper was going to be the biggest challenge of the weekend.  But the fight and determination shown by ECKC was incredible, it was great to see the team going toe to toe with Szentendrei and the 7-14 scoreline did not reflect just how closely contested the match was.

With results going our way, qualification was still in our hands as long as we could beat Kocaeli by 4 or more goals in the final group match. The game plan for this match was to keep the tempo high throughout the match in the hope that the Turkish champions would tire in the latter stages.

By half time, the tactics seemed to be working. We were almost level with Kocaeli and they had begun to show signs of frustration. Everyone played their heart out and I really couldn’t have asked for any more from the players but towards the end of the match the goals just stopped flowing for both sides and it finished 12-15 to Kocaeli.

The final match was to play for 7/8th place and there was little difference between the two positions, but with the new Scottish season getting underway it would be a great opportunity to take some momentum back home. The match also had some British pride at stake with the opposition being Welsh champions Cardiff Raptors.

The first half was comfortable for ECKC, controlling in attack and exerting real pressure in defence but conceding a very fortuitous goal just on the stroke at half time left the score at 7-4 going into the break. With substitutes coming on, ECKC lost a little bit of fluidity and allowed Cardiff to come back into the match but the lessons learned during the earlier matches meant that there was no panic. We soon were back into a commanding lead and closed the game out well to secure a morale boosting win to finish the tournament on a high.

The team has improved so much since the process started just over a year ago, I’m hoping that in another year’s time I’ll be saying exactly the same again!

St Andrews/Dundee

Having celebrated winning both leagues in April, May gave a great opportunity to blow off some steam and play in a couple of relaxing tournaments north of Edinburgh.

Luckily the weather held out and we finished 4th at St Andrews and 5th at Dundee, with somewhat makeshift teams calling in ringers from St Andrews, St Andrews Alumni and Northern Storm… thanks friends!