Day 17 - Wed 29th Oct 08

Breakfast at 8am, almost becoming routine now. Our first day back training since our game against Tonga on Monday night. Although we lost we are not out of this yet and have to get ourselves off the floor and get ready for the next one against Samoa on November 5th. I don´t think people really expected us to do as well as we did but we all knew we had it in us. What was worse was that we knew we had more but the game was played so slowly that we didn´t get the chance to show it.

After breakfast we had a team video analysis of the Tonga match breaking the game down into sections of defence and attack. We had to get the bus to training in the Mounties after this, Sam our bus driver as ever was waiting to take us there. One of the Aussie papers gave us some bad coverage after the Tonga game accusing us of dropping passes and being poor players and they even accused Sam of reversing into a car in an empty car park at the stadium. He took offence at that as it was the Tongan coach driver who had hit the car and not him. Sam you have 40 witnesses.

Mounties training was tough, we were at their game pitch as opposed to the club complex. The conditioning session seemed like it was modified by the Army Rangers with a lot of game related running, wrestling and tackling grids. We had lunch at the Mounties club for around an hour then back to the pitch complex for an aftrenoon session where we focussed on points the coaches had identified as being weak in the video analysis, defensive alignments, talking and finally finishing off with some competitive kicking. I heard the Irish World cup soccer squad always finished their training sessions in the 90´s with penalty competitions which is why they were always so good when it came down to penalties in games. We have some goal kicking competitions where the coaches can pick up who can kick goals as many guys would not be recognised kickers for their clubs. We also have competitions in seeing who can kick a ball from 30 yards to hit the posts, its is very difficult to defend against plays like that when the ball is bouncing off the posts and it really puts the benefit with the momentum of the attacking player as they are charging forward to pick it up.

Last night was the start of a team tattoo session. Lee James a local tattoo artist had started doing the whole team and spent 8 hours straight tattoing yesterday, today he and his mate Andy were finishing off the rest of the team. Most people got the team motto below down in various designs on feet, chest, shoulders or back. We wont forget this World Cup and we wont be forgotten either when its over.

Ni Neart go cur le cheile