EVERYTHING WAS BETTER IN THE OLD DAYS? NOT REALLY! MARC DELISSEN FORMER PLAYER FOR HGC AND THE DUTCH NATIONAL TEAM. WON THE EUROPEAN CUP I IN 1997. E verything used to be different. The players that mattered paid their dues and just showed up. Training was scheduled three times per week, and at set times you volunteered as barkeeper (late on Sunday evenings) as well. If your team had reached the top at the end of the competition, you could call yourself the champions. Each year you said your goodbyes to the two lower ranking teams; often these were the same teams that had been promoted the previous year. The champions had placed for European Cup I which was traditionally played at one club during Whitsun-weekend. Later on, European Cup II was created for the cup winners – or, in the absence of a cup competition – the second-placed teams in the competition. At Easter these teams were allowed to trot out and to show their stuff. In those days I was frequently amazed that there were European competitions for handball, basketball, water polo and volleyball, for which teams were required to travel to games in Hungary, Spain or Denmark arbitrarily on Wednesday evenings. Hockey – which was often regarded as an elitist sport for the rich by unknowing outsiders – had to make do with a tour de force (four games in four days) over a long weekend. In preparation, a few weeks before the competitions, training was intensifi ed and sometimes you were lucky that the club treasurer had approved a short practice trip in the interest of our European reputation. These were not jaunts to exotic locations like Cuba, Singapore of South Africa, which are popular nowadays though. We were quite thrilled and had just as much fun to be heading off for three days in the Belgian Ardennes. All year long you lived and breathed thinking about that upcoming Whitsunweekend and you could boast all year long that you were still in the European Cup. COLUMN 35 to be up for grabs but then again, it was still so far away. These nice matches were very popular with the fans in the Netherlands and Terrassa, and were played with rules that were not subject to change. Players were able to go to the toilet without any cameras around, and the locker room was still the exclusive domain of the players and the coach. Following a victory in the pool came the fi nal. It was just the same as today; you could either win or lose. At the end of the weekend it was time for goodbyes and The EHL has brought European club hockey the allure which it so richly deserves Once you had arrived there, the fi rst two days were used to get accustomed to the ‘stadium’, to calm your nerves, to work on scoring a maximum number of goals and of course, shaking the hands of numerous old acquaintances and buddies. Things only really got exciting during the third and last pool match. Invariably you would then meet serious German or Spanish opponents, or the other Dutch representative, who as last year’s winner had been classifi ed for the same pool as you. The fi nal seemed everyone felt melancholy. Nowadays everything’s different. And better! The European Cup was satisfying until it was no longer enough. The EHL has brought European club hockey the allure which it so richly deserves. It has brought more high level games, state of the art camera recordings, and innovative ideas. We should do everything we can to keep it that way too, so in the future we can continue to muse about our wonderful memories of the old-style European Cup. • 20 07 20 12 Pagina 34

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