Skinners World Cup
England 4th place.
What an honour it was to be part of the England Team at the best International team event in the world.
I can’t say enough about the event from the organisation, team spirit, camaraderie between all teams and the incredible generosity of the Skinners family and company @skinnersfieldandtrial . My team mates and Captain were superb. It was a remarkable event.
The estate it was held on was the most beautiful I’ve seen and dog testing/training ‘heaven’ as someone described it.
The 10 tests over 2 days were very challenging with long distances, bunkers with dogs often in dead ground and out of sight - but cleverly and fairly set. They were all achievable but you had to be the complete package to nail every one.
The Italian Team - who we had the best chance of watching really did put in a very consistent and high quality performance and they deserved to win - so congratulations to them.
Team England had a bit of bad luck, but simply didn’t capitalise on the opportunities we had. We did though do some fantastic work and never gave up, fighting as a team for every point we could get. We often smashed the really difficult long and technical tests, but dropped points on shorted simpler stuff. It was an honour to run with my team mates. All superb handlers and world class dogs.
My performance was in particular let down by one test that should have been a ‘simple’ one. Two marks at not great distance with bunkers that was done poorly. A score of 10/20 really let me down and was the weak link in an otherwise pretty strong performance. But at this level you need to be strong at all tests - not just 9. Simply not good enough.
My dog Harley, as always gave me 100% and it’s purely down to him that I was there.
A great effort but there’s work to be done 💪
Thank you for the words of encouragement, to my training friends and mentors - and especially my fantastic wife for all you do. 🙏
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