Day 2 in Moscow

Rodger Schmidt was European Champion for Germany in 1985 and also took Russ Howard to the last end in the World Final in Vancouver in 1987. Since then he has plied his trade as a coach to the World at large including the Czech Republic (1999-2000), Italy (2000-2007) and the USA (2010 Olympic Games). Since 2007 he has been working with the Austrian teams and is sitting next to me as we watch our respective women’s teams in action against each other. (His ex-teammate, Johnny Jahr, is making a comeback at this level in the A Group upstairs.)

As well as sharing the bench we seem to be stalking each other as we both have similar responsibilities for our small nations, with two teams to coach, and the timetable for a regular day here is 0800 men’s game, 1200 women’s game, 1600 men’s game and 2000 women’s game! When you realise that practice begins half an hour before each game you can see that the time for eating is fairly restricted. Add in the fact that England's men had to play an extra end this morning before finally beating Estonia and you can see why healthy eating and the European Championships are kind of mutually exclusive! Thank goodness for time clocks, but you sometimes pray for a six end game, as long as your team is on the winning side of course! Last night those prayers were answered when, at almost exactly the same time as I was posting yesterday’s blog, Anna Fowler played a delicate backring weight tap back to collect a six against Ireland who then gave up after seven ends with England winning 14-3.

This morning’s game for the men against Estonia seemed to be ours all the way. We scored six singles, including three steals, and headed into the last end 6-4 up. But we lost two against the hammer and then in the extra it required a cold draw to the button by Alan MacDougall to put away the Estonians who had beaten us last year in Champery.

By the way, the 'High-tech' A4 flip chart scorecards (see Blog 1) go up to 29 per side! I think they must have looked at the record books and found that the highest score in International Competition history was 28-3 and just added one! Everything is bigger and better in Russia!

Except the service! When a '4 star' hotel takes an hour to prepare a pizza at 11pm and it then arrives in a box 20 minutes after the waiter has mysteriously dashed out, one does wonder how they ever got a man in space!