After their disappointment of losing the Plate final on Saturday the majority of the Sandwich team headed up to Norwich on the Saturday night to try and drown their sorrows. The evening was fairly eventful with the traditional annual pilgrimage to Chicagos to dance to some classic cheese and meet some new "friends and supporters". The evening finished with the consumption of the presents that we had brought for the tournament organisers (sorry guys but we were still thirsty!) and a brief bit of redecorating of the B&B at 4am!
So in the morning Sandwich consumed a hearty breakfast, and ventured out in fairly subdued spirits into the cold and the wind to meet up with the rest of the team who had travelled up that morning and play some korfball. The first match was against Cambridge Tigers 2 and Sandwich put up a surprisingly good display considering what a disorganised rabble they looked, the final score being a 1 - 1 draw.
The second match against a young Dutch Ritola team saw Sandwich expecting to get a good hiding as we usually do against Dutch youngsters!! However Sandwich again played well to take the lead before again being pegged back to a 1 - 1 draw. The final game of the morning was against Cambridge Kites 1. This was another very tight match with the scores remaining at 0 - 0 until the last few minutes. A penalty was then awarded to Kites which they converted to snatch the match 1 - 0.
The results from the morning put is in the 3rd pool out of 4 for the afternoon, seeing us play off for 10th - 13th positions. The first match of the afternoon was against Stingers, and it was clear that for some of our players the hangovers were really kicking in and energy levels were low (some were even called "grumpy" at this stage but I think that was a little strong and that "weary" would have been more appropriate!). Anyway, the upshot was that we suffered our heaviest defeat of the day, losing 6 - 0 in a sorry performance.
The next match was against the newly formed Littleport lions club from the Cambridge area, and saw Sandwich play some much better korfball to come away with a 3 - 1 victory. This left us with the final game of the day against our old adversaries from the Kent league, Olympians. In another tight match Sandwich gained the upper hand winning 2 - 1. This left Sandwich in 11th place out of 18, not a bad result as this was the first tournament for some of our players, and the windy conditions made scoring goals fairly random and the matches low scoring.
Roll on Portugal and some sun!!