Sixty children from Sevenoaks Hockey Club attended a Hockey tournament in Barcelona between the 9^th and 11^th December. Cian N (Second Form) has written the following report on the trip.

After a long journey, we arrived in Barcelona, Spain. the heat shocked me as I am not used to that much sun in England. Every morning we had to wake up at 7.30am for a 7.45am breakfast before the buses came at 8.00am.

In the RC POLO Hockey club, they had three pitches spread out. Two pitches were next to each other where the scenes were set and the other pitch was further away and had seated stands, a scoreboard and high netting.

On the second day, we had two games. In our first game of the day, we managed to beat the home club, RC POLO, 1:0 with a late tap-in by one of our players at the far post. In the second game, we won 2:0 which was the easiest game of the tournament. We won the game with a reverse stick shot from the top of the D going into the netting, and a dribble around the keeper on the left with an easy tap-in. Later that day, we went to the hostel and I stayed in a room with Nathan Calverley and Seb Harmer (both Second Form) which was very fun.

The third day was the same morning routine with the same number of matches in the day. The first game of the day was very exciting, with many breakaways from our side, but no goal. The result of this match was 0:0 against Real Sociedad with Maxim Ongley-Dellar putting his body on the line to make some thrilling saves as the goalkeeper. That game was disappointing, but our results were good.

We topped our group with seven points out of nine whilst the team in second place got six points. The top two teams go through to the semi-finals from each of the two groups. The second game that day was in the semi-finals on the main pitch, we were 1:0 down until we scored a late equaliser with five minutes to go. We held on for the last five minutes until the game went to a shoot-out. We knew the result was not going to be good for us since we had not practised shuffles that much. As we thought, it did not go our way losing 2:1, meaning we went into the third and fourth playoff game the next day.

It was the same routine in the morning but with only one match since it was the last day. We were doing well in the game with a couple of missed chances but could not score any goals from either side. We had to play shuffles again which was not our strong point from the last game. It did not start out well for us, missing our first one and them scoring theirs.

The second ones went the exact same way and we lost 2:0 on shuffles, this was not the best result and we subsequently finished fourth. That day at 3.30pm, we took a bus to the airport and saw our plane delayed from 7.00pm until 9.00pm, so we had to wait for a while. After some time in the airport, the flight was cancelled because of snow meaning that we had to go to another hotel that night and the next morning the flight was cancelled for the second time. Finally, we took off early in the morning the next day and then we landed safely in England with snow beneath our feet.