The easiest way to turn your car into a Migros stickermania album is to drive from Zürich to Ljubljana. Apart from a Swiss vignette you also need an Austrian and a Slovenian one, turning your windshield into a colourful display of good road tax paying behaviour.

Despite enthusiastic advertising of the tournament to the current players, USZ can still not get a tournament-strength Underwater Hockey team together. We therefore hooked up again with our buddies from Munich to field a combined Bavarian - Swiss German team for the tournament (rallying cry: "Hopp Bayern und Deutschschweiz!"). This time only three players from USZ could make it (Joëlle Meijer, Martin Reed and Jos Visser) but fortunately the German team brought enough players to get a decent team in the water for every game. Unfortunately one of the German players had an accident on the evening before the tournament and tore a muscle, which prevented him from playing.

The organisation was not entirely up to Swiss standards. The tournament schedule was in flux until pretty much the start of the first game. We were somewhat overtaken by this and had to run to another playing area where the game had already started without us. People jumped in and got going, but unfortunately in the ensuing chaos both right forwards found themselves at the pool edge with six players already in the water. Some shouting and substituting later we had seven players in the water (fortunately the referees couldn't count that well :-) ). We never got our act together in this first game and lost quite badly.

In the subsequent games of the first round we improved our game but unfortunately we were not able to win a single game and thus ended last in our group. In the second round the bottom halves of both groups came together, so that we were now playing against teams of roughly our own level. We did much better in this round, losing one game but winning against Rome, Trieste and a Hungarian ladies team from Budapest.

Because of our decent play in the second round we ended tenth out of thirteen, which all in all is quite a good result for a mixed team containing a lot of novice players.

The Zürich players would like to thank the Munich team and especially captain Marion Brandl for the opportunity to play together.

Report by Jos Visser

Martin Reed