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| Harry in his Columban colours |
Harry Morris has written below about playing representative Hockey for his province.
The final
squad for the U-18 Leinster Hockey
team was selected
two weeks ago. There was a lot
of preparation leading
up to the interpros.
We played the Irish women’s team twice before the interpros. We beat
them comfortably both times. On the 18th of
November the Leinster
squad met at
the Stillorgan Park
hotel at 11 o’clock
and checked in .
From there we took
a 10 minute drive
to UCD and did
short practice
and set plays.
The atmosphere leading
up to this
game was very
tense. I had not
really experienced anything
like this in my
hockey life. I was
excited but nervous
at the same
time which you
would expect. From UCD we
went back to the hotel
we got changed and
then went down
to our meeting
room where we had lunch
and talked about
our tactics. It was
around 11.30 when we
got there and
are game started
at 1.
3-2. That was
the score that
nearly lost us the
interpros. We played terribly. When we
got back to
the hotel we
talked about what
we had done wrong. After
that we just relaxed and dozed
off to bed, tomorrow was
even more important
for us now. We
got a reception
call at 8 o’clock
and went for
a relaxing jog
to wake the
body up. We got breakfast at 9
o’clock. Our first game was at 1:00
against Munster. We left the
hotel at 11:30 and arrived at
11:45.
We won
comfortably against Munster (9-2)
and this set
us up for
a crunch match
against Ulster later
that day as
Ulster had also
beaten Munster. This meant
that Munster had
to beat Ulster
for us to
have a chance of
winning the tournament. To our
amazement Munster beat
Ulster (1-0) with
Ulster missing a
stroke on the
final whistle. It only
remained for us to
beat Munster in
order to win
the tournament we did
so by
beating Munster (9-2).
It was
a huge
honour to play for my
province and the
standard was better
than anything I
had played in
before.
Shortly after the interpros I received word that (along with R. Canning VI) I had been shortlisted for the U-18 Ireland squad - another great honour and no doubt another leap in standard.
For
a full report on the tournament click here:
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