The early hours of Saturday morning saw the Shelford IV's set off to Barcelona for their inaugural European League fixture, against the Enginyers of Poblenou.

With most of the team flying from Luton, the atmosphere was building as we made the final mini-bus pick up from Shelford Rugby Club car park at 2.45am. The atmosphere on the bus also revealed that one or two of the squad had not had much sleep and there was a cloud of fumes hanging over Joey Cullen, which was a bad portent for what was to follow later in the afternoon.

And so, Luton airport, not the finest of places to spend two hours and with little else to occupy us we hit the bar. Joey Cullen enjoyed his “breakfast” - which was definitely missing some of the important nutritional food groups expected of an international athlete.

Luckily for the team, Chef de Mission, Mike Whibley had travelled as an advance party to check out the facilities  and reported back to us that the Poblenou  pitch was under water after 3 days of heavy rainfall. The fixture was moved to the Olympic Rugby Stadium at Valle D’Hebron, an artificial pitch….. and the kick off pushed back to 7.30pm! All hope of getting the team to the stadium in a fit state was lost. The lads threw their bags into the hotel rooms and so began a crazy afternoon, led by team trouble-maker Simon Kidney, and much to the waiter’s delight; round after round began to arrive, with only some salted green chillies and a few plates of Pata Negra Iberico ham to soak everything up 

By the agreed RDV time of 5pm, Joey, having received the dubious guidance of Tom Arnold all afternoon, had lost consciousness and could not be roused. We put him in the recovery position and headed down the Rambla to the Metro with the KO approaching.

It began to rain heavily as we somehow found the sports ground. Once changed, Larry Bennett required a lie down and found some tackle pads to sleep on. Duncan Stafford withdrew on medical advice and the rest of us began warming up and tried to make it look like we at least knew how to catch.

The match, in brief:

Poblenou were sober to a man and had quite a handy inside centre from Bolivia. Their back row were fast and they made it difficult for us. However, the pre match psych-up paid dividends as we scored first, through Charlie Pettit breaking through the middle and side stepping the Poblenou full back. Conversion was missed as the kicking T went missing, and Olly Green found that it was impossible to create a kicking divot in astro-turf. From the restart, Poblenou applied sustained pressure, finally breaking our line to level the score at 5-5. Shelford then had to put up a backs to the wall defensive performance before we broke up field nearing half time and, against 4th team regulations, decided to have a penalty kick for goal – Olly Green (having found the missing kicking T) slotted it perfectly and we made it to half time in front 8-5 on the scoreboard, but behind 15-14 on the player count, after Tom Arnold decided he’d been on the pitch far too long and was shown a yellow card for smelling too strongly of alcohol every time he shouted at the referee… which was quite often.

Into the second half and a raft of changes from Shelford. Pretty soon the casualties started to mount as first Dan Rodgers was knocked out cold, putting in a huge head first tackle. Then Tom Truelove got a nasty bang to the head which would later see him stumbling around Barcelona in the early hours, unsure of where his hotel was, or his passport; concussion for sure. As Shelford defended bravely, Larry Bennett was also forced to retire from the action after a short 2 minute cameo. We were running out of seats for the injured players. However, the league win was secured as first Olly Green with a nerveless penalty, then Gareth Ash muscling over the line with 3 Poblenou players hanging off him (converted by man of the match Green) took the final score to Poblenou Enginyers 5 – 18 Shelford IV.

Huge thanks to our hosts for putting on tremendous post match hospitality. We look forward to welcoming them back to Shelford in February. Thanks to all the squad for making it such a good trip and for playing so well in adversity.