Paddlington Canoe Polo 2018

Tournament report from Canoe Polo President, and captain, Cameron Underwood.

Great performance at Paddlington this weekend by the Open and Freshers teams at Surrey! Open team placed 11th of 16. Freshers team placed 6th of 12

Open Team report:
The open team started with a tough start against a Blackwater teammate dominated team known as Censored, resulting in a 5 – 0 loss, followed by a very well fought match against Nottingam A (who came 4th at BUCS this year) resulting in a 3 – 1 loss with a well worked assist from Callum Jefferies leading to Cameron Underwood grabbing a goal back. Our next game was against Exeter A which resulted in a 3 – 0 victory to Surrey with a classic fat boy goal from Kiran Prinjha and two more from Cameron.
This ended up our group stage in 3rd of 4, a fair result given the very tough starting group. Our seeding match was then against South West old gits, who beat us by 6 – 0. This ended our first day by seeding us into the bottom half of 9th – 16th.
On Sunday we started in a seeding game against Birmingham B, which was started very strongly by Ivan Spooner with two quick goals followed by many goals shared by most members of the team to result in a 8 – 0 victory to Surrey.
This lead us to play against University of London A (who came 3rd at BUCS this year) in a very well fought match, an early goal from London put us on the back foot but we recovered well with a phenomenal goal from Devon Francis to level it early in the second half. An unfortunate late goal for London and a substitution error from us late game caused us to be chasing the game with 4 on the pitch to the final second, but we couldn’t quite get passed London’s strong defence.
Our final game was competing for 11th/12th against Exeter A again, who had rebounded strongly from their defeat the day before, playing very strongly, kept us on our toes, but we narrowly managed to get the 2 – 1 win with another classic Fat-Boy goal from Eoin Cremin.

Overall a really strong performance, holding our own against clubs at the top end of University level Canoe Polo! Bonus thanks to Samuel Westbrook who came along to support us and provide us with these photos!