Madrid magic

I am still recovering from my recent trip to Madrid to support our 1st XI girls in the Division A Elite of the European Cup Winners Cup. We spent a fantastic 4 days supporting the team, eating tapas, drinking red wine and watching Real Madrid beat Osasuna 2-0 on Sunday evening in the Bernabeau....the only pity was the weather, which was the worst in Europe that Easter weekend; rain showers and cold breezes - not the most conducive to watching hockey all day.

On the hockey front, Alex competed well in their pool games against essentially professional hockey players but suffered the disappointment of relegation to Division B following sudden death penalty strokes against Viktoria Smolevich of Belarus. Read some of the press releases here.

Amidst the disappointment of the final game relegation, a brilliant thing happened to my friends Guy Garrett and Gillian O'Shea. The team were in the goalmouth having their photograph taken when suddenly the supporters started screaming... Guy had asked the scoreboard man to put up a message for Gillian asking her to marry him!
Surrounded by Alex teammates and friends Guy goes down on one knee in the goalmouth to ask Gillian to marry him. There wasn't a dry eye in the place let me tell you :)

As Guy and I were doing the final press report, I asked him who else had known of his plan to propose. "Only the Spanish scoreboard man" he quipped!