Joanna Lane - Four Nations Tournament
Hi I’m Jo Lane and in March I went to Germany where I represented England Hockey Under 16s in the 4-nations tournament.
This year the tournament was held at the German hockey club Mannhiemer, the clubs facilities were amazing, much better than any club in England. They had two water based pitches and a videoing tower, which was huge!
In the weeks running up to the tournament I was looking forward to it as on all the other camps I have been on with England you have always been under assessment but this time I knew I had made the squad, but I was also nervous as it was my first tournament with England and I knew it would be a higher standard of hockey than I had played before.
It was really strange arriving at the airports as we were traveling with the under18 girls so there were 36 of us all in the same tracksuit all with matching stick bags, traveling bags and rucksacks. When we had all arrived we kept getting funny looks from people and someone even took a photograph of us.
Our first game was against Germany and straight away I noticed how the pace of the game was much faster and how much more aggressive it was. We drew 2-2 but the whole team felt disappointed as we knew we could have beaten them.
Our second game was against Holland, who are famous for being one of the best countries at hockey in the world. Before we played we lined up on the pitch in our teams and sung our national anthems. We lost to Holland 3-2 but it was a very close game and we felt a draw would have been a fair result.
In our last group game we again lost 3-2 to Spain which was really annoying as we had loads more chances than them but we just couldn’t score. This meant we were in the 3rd and 4th position play off against Germany which we lost 1-0 which was one of the most disappointing games as we really should have won.
At the end of the tournament as a team we were disappointed as we felt we had played well but just didn’t get the results we deserved, and also everyone was really tired from playing 4 games in 4 days.
I really enjoyed the tournament and if I get selected for the next one, which will be the European Championships, which are to be held in Holland in July, I hope we get better results as a team.