The first day of our beach adventure started with the squad flying into the Netherlands from all corners of Europe, but ironically not Wales. On the whole there were successful flights from Spain, France, England, and Scotland… bar one. Birmingham International decided the weather was too bad in Amsterdam for the flight to go ahead, and the airline could not offer an alternative until the following evening. This leaves us a boy and a team manager down for the first day of the competition! In fairness, she was stressed, but every question we asked the TM was answered with “LOL” until Tom coaxed a schedule out of her. We now know our first match is at 2pm against Portugal.
However, the rest of us weren’t about to let this dampen our spirits so we headed to Den Haag to meet up for food and refreshments. We found our enigmatic leader, the one and only Tom Brady, at Refill Bar, approximately 50m down the road from our hostel. He claims it started raining and he was forced to camp there for three hours, but he was able to point us in the direction of an Italian… which turned out to be a kebab shop that sold pizzas. At this stage we weren’t too fussed and enjoyed a pizza each.
We spent the evening catching up, discussing past korfball trips we had all been on with different teams (an Ireland trip to meet the Grand Duke of Luxembourg was an interesting one), and debating the best way to approach a new brand of korfball that none of us have played together or competitively yet. We headed to bed feeling optimistic about the next few days, even if the weather isn’t doing the same!
Keep visiting Welsh Korfball to keep up to date with the tournament from the Welsh perspective. For official updates, visit www.beachkorfball.ikf.org