VVV and Koninginnedag Weekend (1/5) (a little late but still here)

This is a week late but as they say better late than never.  Plans had been in the making for some time for this weekend, we had heard so much before we arrived and were assured the Dutch celebration of Koninginnedag; thier Queens day, would be a good one.  What we had heard was there were too important things 1.  You needed to get dressed up in as much orange clothing as possible and 2nd was you had to drink bucket loads of booze. 

Unfortunately for us the cancellation of games in December meant that the rescheduling of matches resultaed in a catch up against VVV on the Sunday meaning indulging fully in Koninginnedag couldnt really happen if i were to walk on the field on sunday insome sort of respectable condition.....so unfortunately the bucket loads of booze part had to be missed but it didnt mean we didnt get involved in the festivities......

Friday after training we headed into

the city to experience the Koninginnenacht (the night before koninginnedag) it was a bit of a shock finding the whole centre of Den Haag turned into one major festival, fully decked out with rides etc and everyone out on the streets partying really hard. It was rather insane and unexpected. i couldn't have ever thought they would celebrate this much, though inow understand what the stories were about. Koninginnedag, was  a pretty easy day chosing to experience the "local village" approach to the event.  for the Dutch Koninginnedag is the only day during the year that you can have like a car boot sale in the streets and as you can imagine there were people everywhere selling everything from beers to baskets. the best thing woulod have been all the kids selling thier unwanted toys or sellin home made cakes for pocket money, while the parents enjoy a few glasses of wine.  It was good experience to see it all, and you can see some of the photos attached from the friday night and the Saturday afternoon in Voorburg.

Moving onto the hockey......Sunday morning saw us head up to Amstelveen (near amsterdam) to take on VVV. It was a bit of weird day, i think mainly because of a combination of the windy warm weather and the apparent hangovers from the previous day and the general holiday feeling.  But either way we had a job to do. This feeling was portrayed when at the start of the game one of the VVV players said to me.

"really this is criminal putting a game on the same weekend as Koninginnedag"  Was interesting especially because he was clearly struggling from the celebration.  It kind of reminded me of some Sundays back home in Newy...hahaha. but i suppose that summed up the rest of the match. 

Having been sensible on the friday and saturday our guys playe well, finding ourselves 5-0.  i could go through the goals but in short we worked well together as a team.  There was lots of passing and unselfish play creating team goals, the best kind.  From there we kind of turned the motor off.  Although it would have been good to bury VVV and score another few, we lapsed allowing them to score a few concellation goals and finished it off 6-3.  All in all a good day taking the three points.  

ill get to the match Review fromthe Amstelvven match in the next couple of days...i promise.