A Country Practice...

Sunday morning arrived far too early. Still hadn’t caught up the missed sleep from Saturday. The buffet breakfast was good, although they had run out of the first serving by the time I got there.

Then we were off to the stadium for the first training session. It was less than 10 minutes drive from the hotel, which is a pleasant change from some of the times in the Australian championships. The stadium has 2 turfs similar to the one used in the Sydney Olympics and Perth’s previous No 1.

As we hadn’t played together before, this was the first practice as a countrywide team. Jane the trainer first took us through a 20 minute stretch and warm up, together with the 45 team. We then did various drills, which will be part of our pre game warm up.

We finished with a half field game. This ended abruptly when I had a collision with Stokesy. She initially was worried that she’d hurt her knee but it turned out to just be a knock and I had a whack on my hip, which was painful but had no lasting damage.

We came back to the hotel briefly before heading out for lunch. I’m having my Optifast bars. I’m not on a diet perse and still eating nibbles, lollies etc as they are offered but at least I won’t be having a big lunch as well. While most of the group were eating I wandered off with a couple of others and got some money from an ATM. They had a coffee in a mall and I had a bit of a look around.

We had a team meeting in the early evening before a second training session at 6.30. After the drills we started working on short corners. It looks like I’ll be at the layoff position on the left of the trapper. Finally we finished up with penalty flick practice with a bit of a comp between 2 teams. Each match has to have a result so it is possible that one or more could got to flicks to decide the winner.

We headed back to the Londoner, the same pub where the others had lunch, for dinner, still in our practice gear and tracksuits. I had the Sunday Roast which was quite nice, and a shandy with some brown ale.

We got to bed just before midnight and about 5-10 minutes after lights out my phone rang. I was a call from Thailand from a company that is looking at taking on my Production System. It was only 7pm there. Once I’d got back to bed and we’d settled down again, Megan’s alarm went off on her phone. We’d got over that when Annie’s phone rang with her daughter wishing her a Happy Mother’s Day. That was at 12-30 and fortunately the last call of the night.