European Senior Championships – Ljubljana 7-13 August 2022

Started my journey with setting off at 1am to Manchester airport, to ensure there would be plenty of time for any potential traffic and airport queue time.  Fortunately, everything went fairly smoothly and got to Munich where quite a few people may have witnessed my not-so-pretty running across the airport to catch my second flight to Ljubljana.

Arrived at Ljubljana airport at noon and was welcomed with lovely weather.  Logistics between airport and accommodation was well organised, didn’t have to wait long before a coach arrived to pick up all players and technical officials to their hotels. The TO’s hotel is conveniently situated in the city centre where it’s a minute away from everything.  Due to the early arrival, I took the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing and shopping.  I was later joined by the French umpires for dinner before heading back to the hotel for briefing.

We met the referee team from the briefing, which was headed by Monique Bastien and her deputies, Julien Nys, Daniel Sahlberg and Jas Bedi.  Briefing was pretty standard apart from the number of matches we had to cover for the first three days, over 950 matches!  We were also given our rota, where me and Ian J were happy to see our group was the only group that had two morning sessions off.  After all, beauty sleep is very important to us.

Tournament took place in Stožice Hall which consisted of twelve courts.  It was a lovely venue well setup for the tournament.  Air conditioning could have beeen a bit stronger to combat the high temperatures during the day but it was not too uncomfortable.  Due to the lack of TOs, we had to umpire without a service judge for the first four days of the tournament, which was somewhat different and more challenging.  Each match had two line judges.  Some of them were quite inexperienced which turned some of the tight line calls into a tricky situation.  Overall players were happy with my decisions with no major issues.  From Day 5 onwards, we were umpiring and service judging. I certainly felt more at ease with the help of a SJ in controlling the matches.  It so happened that 3 of the umpires at the tournament all had birthdays within a few days of each other including our own Ian !  One of the umpires prepared a cake while others sang Happy Birthday about 20 times throughout the day, much to his consternation and embarrassment.  I think Ian might have aged 10 years that day!  We also managed to find Vigo's ice cream shop, which was a must visit every night !

This event also happened to be a Badminton Europe assessment for BEC.  There were ten candidates and sadly not all of them passed the assessment.  I heard it was mostly because of the written paper. Hopefully they will pass on their next assessment.

I had a great time throughout the tournament, working with new and familiar faces.  Certainly it had a different vibe or atmosphere compared to other BE tournaments, perhaps because it’s a senior event.  Everyone was in good spirit looking for a good time.  It also gave me a valuable experience in umpiring, as it’s quite different in match control with the seniors.  Some players did not have a lot of experience with having umpires at their matches, so there was always a chance the players may throw a curve ball in their behaviours.  England players did well, coming top of the medal table winning 41 medals in total, including 16 Golds.

 I enjoyed the challenge and it kept the games interesting, certainly provided a lot of scenarios for me to analyse afterwards.