The main objective in participating in this competition was to get promoted to Group A.

With the withdrawal of Korea, the competition involved 10 teams: England, Andorra, Macao, Australia, Austria, New Zealand, China, China Taipei, Japan and … Catalonia. I am not going to get involved in the political issues surrounding the participation of Catalonia but it has to be remarked that Catalonia is a region of Spain and therefore their players are professionals. Hence our second place is equivalent to World Champions Group B.

The competition was split into two groups and we were part of Group B along with Catalonia, Austria, Japan and Australia. I had decided to rotate the players in this phase to ensure our fitness level would be good enough to play the knock-out phase. We finished second in the group losing only one game against Catalonia and winning the other games with a lot of ball possession. We dominated the games that we won but there was a lack of concentration when attacking in the Austria game (4-1) and defensively in the Australia game (7-4). The best game in this phase was our opening game against Japan in which we played very consistently in attack and defence (14-0).

I decided to stop the rotation system when we started the knock-out phase and I used the players depending on tactical issues suitable for each game, New Zealand (18-4) in the quarter-final, Macao (9-4) in the semi-final and Catalonia (0-6) in the final.

All the players showed a lot of maturity in this competition, listened carefully in time-outs and responded very well to changes of tactical instructions. This has been a struggle in the past However since I begun my role as England Coach I have seen an improvement. This improvement has taken a larger leap from the previous events to this competition and we must keep up this momentum to do the job required in Group A.

Under my coaching this is the third time we have been promoted to Group A (1st place in 2000, 3rd in 2002 & 2nd in 2004).

We are now in the position to stop going up and down as we have learnt the areas that we have to improve to become a permanent Group A team. Our players had more than enough fitness for success in Group B but as I have mentioned in my previous report (European Championship) we found it very hard to play against teams with higher level of fitness, ie. Catalonia. I will prepare a plan in conjunction with our Fitness Coach, George Johnson, to ensure the improvements are achieved. As I always said the Tactical component depends on the fitness levels.

We are just 9 months away from Group A in San Jose, California. The players have their homework to do and we will be checking fitness as part of the process to finalise the team.

One final word of thanks to all the players for the fantastic team spirit showed during our stay in Macao.

Carlos Amaral

England Senior Head Coach

More info:
Reporter: Aileen Barker