Senior men’s water polo eases back into the pool - May 20, 2022

We are very pleased to announce that, following completion of the 2021-22 Danube League season by the Great Britain senior women’s development squad, it is now the turn of the senior men’s program.

To that end, Swim England, in conjunction with a local organising committee led by Ian Elliot, will host a senior men’s friendly international tournament for the Home Nations, over the weekend of 28-29 May. The event will take place at the excellent deep water facility at Alan Higgs Centre in Coventry CV3 1HW, operated by CV Life.

The event will see England’s senior men’s development squad competing against Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the first competitive senior men’s fixtures to be played in England for three years, and represents a great opportunity for all the teams involved to ease themselves back into international competition. Following the event, England’s senior men will then play in the EU Nations in Brno (June 24-26) and an Exhibition game hosted by BWPL against the 2012 Olympians in London on July 9.

Match officials for the Home Nations Tournament have been drawn from the ranks of our senior British domestic officials, which now include Ukraine’s Anna Gonachrenko, who has recently moved to the UK from Kharkiv and was profiled by us recently here.

The Home Nations event matches will all be in 30m pitches, and will utilise flying subs for the first time in this country.

Matches will also be videoed and screened at a later date thanks to the support of leading sport videographers, We Play Sport, in conjunction with the BWPL.

We Play Sport have advised us that their algorithms will also be capturing basic statistics from the matches, some of which they will be starting to put on to the app within the next two weeks.  This includes things like penalties, goals breakdown by quarter, swim-off wins, and a heatmap of the locations the goals were scored from, which will be available for every game going forward. More information about We Play Sport, and how they can assist your club’s development can be found on their website here.

The following players have been selected for England’s men’s development squad:

Ben Alcorn
Dan Atkinson
Ashley Castle
Lewis Daly
George Davies
Jordan Elliot
Joe Hubble
Tom Hunt
Charles Kingsmill
Joel Leighton
Tom Manley
Elliot McHugh
Dan Paddon
Fin Parnell
Mikey Patterson
Rudi Polster
John Pratt
Toby Roberts
James Salt
Aaron Winstanley

Coach – Matt Holland
Team manager – Ian Elliot

The provisional event timetable looks like this:

Saturday May 28th
13:00 – Ireland v Scotland
14:30 – Wales v England
18:15 – Wales v Scotland
19:45 – England v Ireland

Sunday 29th May
09:15 – Ireland v Wales
10:40 – England v Scotland

Entry is free, there’s plenty of parking and all are welcome. We look forward to seeing you there!

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