It seems like a long time since the last post I made, and it is...  it's now cold in the workshop!  Time flies. Apologies to those who were following for pulling up short before the competition was finished...  I may go back and try to do some analysis at a later stage of the last few games and the grades I didn't have much of a look at, but I tried to look at a game just now and it's no good, life has crammed itself in around the euphoria surrounding the competition and there's not enough space left in my brain to try to see whats going on...  it just looks like a bunch of fish now. I can sti ..read more

Wow things have been busy here lately, and with a heat-wave coming across the ditch from our mates in Australia where it gets proper hot. Temperature has hit 36 degrees C in our workshop, that's the current record.  Needless to say I have been appropriating a large quantity of the kids ice-blocks. Next up in the blog is the last couple of semi-finals, both involving GB, with the men playing France who beat them 1-0 in the RR (first game of the comp or very close) and the women playing Colombia. This one is a bit of a wordsy one with stats.  Ooh statistics, exciting! We will look at the men fi ..read more

It's a very odd thing about the Uwh worlds competitions, the way the comp plays out at the end. My first comp I think we placed 7th in Hobart in 2000, and I have vague recollections of a poolside frenzy of gear-swapping and semi-stripping of which I actually avoided, wanting to hold onto my own gear because...  it was my first gear with a fern on it at a worlds.  So I think I probably wandered through the crowd with a spare T-Shirt held out in front of me until I ended up swapping it with some other sweaty (possibly slightly tipsy) person. Anyone want to swap a shirt?   It can be drastically ..read more

In last post, we left off at halftime.   NZL 1, TUR 1. It's just occurred to me that I will see most of my team-mates at Interzones in a few weeks, and I've been steadily taking the piss out of many of them for months now.  There may be residual payback building up, so I will attempt to take the piss out of myself a bit to make up for it in this post. Should be easy, I'm a slow moving target these days. As the second half started, puck went camera-side off the strike and dropped back to Coskun the Turkish left half, who proceeded to barrel lanes down the wall with me hanging off him like a rag ..read more

From last posts Prologue Fast forward to vaguely modern times. In 2013 we got to play Turkey in a Quarterfinal, and it was very tight.  I think they went up a goal first and we ended up winning 2-1, something like this.  They were playing the style I had coached them with, 2-3-1, and the coaches were guys I had coached.  By then there was only one guy there in the team I had actually coached myself. From there, the Turkish team and especially their U23 team built up a big reputation for being very physical and winning games with 4 guys in the water the whole game.  They made sinbins look easy ..read more

Before we dig into our semi-final against Turkey, a bit of backstory as there's a bit of history to this for me personally. This is 12 years ago now so I'm hazy on a few details but I'll just bustle on and try to sound confident and it'll be fine. In 2007 (maybe late 2006?) Andrew Carr the longtime NZ Mens coach went over to Turkey and did some coaching there to try to help them develop.  After he came back home, they wanted him to go again but I think he was out of leave from work, or simply generously handed the gig on, but either way, I got the opportunity to go over to Turkey for 3 months ..read more

Oh man.  What a week.  What a holiday, what a year so far.  Yesterday we had some family landmarks, with our 2 year old learning the names of body parts I never imagined a 2 year old singing songs about, and our 5 year old learning how to give the middle finger to random people in public. I'm keen to get into our Semi-final but let's have a look at our NZ womens semi-final against South Africa first...   it's a goodie.  I've been neglecting in-depth coverage of our ferny sisters. I spotted something to geek over from the outset, but I also wanted to take a page out of Ross-the-powerful-backs b ..read more

Merry Christmas and Happy New year, dear underwater hockey geeky blog follower!  All the best for the coming year, may your sticks never break, your togs never disappear up your bum crack and may the masks of your enemies be filled with bubbles. As we find ourselves past christmas time and edging past New Year, back in the hindsight diary we have crept up to the last round of Quarterfinals in the Mens division, USA versus NZ.  With a lot of side-tracking along the way. In camp, during one of our rest days we went for a group visit to a local shop in search of costumes for the party.  You don't ..read more

There are just so many more quarterfinals when you look at 2 grades and I haven't even had a chance to glance at the Masters grades.  Brilliant. So, we will stay with the hockey until the round is complete and then maybe zoom out a bit and see whats happening at basecamps of the various teams and around the comp. Aussie Women vs SA Ladies This was a great game, I took a quick look and ended up watching the whole thing.  Part of the entertainment value is Nick, Jack and Jack giving each other a big dose of banter but also always fun to hear all the terminology from the Aussies, they seem to hav ..read more

Spain vs GB  We have had a bit of a look at GB already so a bit more on Spain this post.  First, have to recognise the work these guys have put in and the huge improvements they have made over the past few years.  They are a genuine chance to beat any team on their day now and this kind of improvement is making the Mens Elite grade a massive tussle all the way through the groups. This vid, all the way through to the goal shows some great support and pressure.   Most notably you can see how they are cranking their center players.  Alvaro number 8 is their Center, and Fer number 11 is their goa ..read more