2000 6-Nations Championships -
River Bann, Portglenone, N. Ireland : 12/13 August
Scotland Team Result – 4th on Day 1 beating France & Belgium, 5th after Day 2 beating Belgium overall. Wales 1st, England 2nd, France 3rd, Ireland 4th
Individuals – George Glen 14th from 36, John Callaghan - section win
Team - John Callaghan, Dave Corcoran, George Glen, Dean Irving, Dave McAuley, Stephen McCaveny
The 6-Nations event is much higher profile and standard than the old Home International. All 6 teams took the event seriously and entered strong teams. The fact that France had their full World Championships team there was very encouraging for the future, making this exactly the kind of challenging event we need to develop our anglers. Though the team result was not great for us we certainly did get the benefit of the competition and our experienced and less experienced team members have taken a lot from the event.
3 days of useful practice showed that skimmer bream on the long pole with joker and chopped worm in groundbait was the main method. Though we have no river venues like this in Scotland and have no depth of knowledge in this style of fishing we did work out many of the details required, and that helped us to a decent team performance on day 1. John Callaghan fished very well for a deserved section win and the rest of the team followed through with what we had learned to give us 4th place, not far behind the leaders and ahead of France and Belgium.
Two factors led to the team falling back to 5th place after day 2. Firstly teams of the world class of France and Belgium are always going to learn fast and come back strongly, and so it proved. Also all of the teams learned the benefit of feeding more as the fish fed more confidently later in the match. Unfortunately because of this a weakness in the Scottish anglers make-up became clear as day 2 wore on. Perhaps because of inexperience with skimmer bream the Scottish anglers were too tentative with re-feeding and did not attack enough costing us a lot of points in the last hour.
Congratulations to Wales for a brilliant performance and a well deserved win.