By Bob Fromer
Sant Boi, Spain: 21 July – The GB Senior Women’s Team played a competitive game of softball on Wednesday evening for the first time in almost three years – albeit a 
pre-European Championship warm-up – and the result was a seamless and efficient 8-0 win against Spain.
Before that, the last time the GB Women had been on the field was on 27 July 2019, in the heart-breaking final of the Europe/Africa Olympic Qualifier for Tokyo. That game took place in Utrecht in temperatures of close to 40 degrees, a record or near-record at the time for the Netherlands.
Fast forward three years and one pandemic, and the GB Team flew from London to Barcelona on Tuesday leaving behind the highest-ever recorded temperatures in parts of Britain.
The flight incorporated all the miseries of post-pandemic air travel: long queues to check in, long queues for security, long queues for restaurants and fast-food outlets and women’s loos, and the 24-strong GB Women’s Team group were virtually the only people wearing facemasks in a heaving Gatwick South Terminal.
And finally, once on the plane, there was a 40-minute wait before the aircraft could be refuelled.
The Barcelona area, by contrast, was almost pleasant, at 28 degrees on arrival in the sharp afternoon Mediterranean sunlight.
But this part of Spain has had almost no rain for months: the usual wet spring never materialised. Flying from the UK to Spain, France looked scorched and dry and the Pyrenees were almost white with heat.
The European Women’s Championship, which will start here on Sunday with 23 countries in competition, will be played at four different venues. One of them is in Barcelona itself, at the 1992 Olympic baseball/softball complex on the hill at Montjuic, where the team trained on Wednesday morning.
But the other three grounds are south of the city, in Sant Boi, near the airport at Viladecans and at Gava – strange towns where you can see hills in one direction and catch a glimpse of the sea in the other, but what’s around you is motorways and interchanges and mile after mile of massive distribution warehouses, light industrial estates, shopping malls, stark concrete blocks of flats and modern faceless hotels.
It's an alien world, far away from Gaudi and the Ramblas.
There are trees, but little other vegetation – and yet the walkway and buildings between the baseball fields and the softball field at Sant Boi are covered in purple flowers.
Sant Boi is a famous location in GB softball history – it’s where the 2016 GB Under-19 Women’s Team won our first and only gold medal in European fastpitch softball, with Georgina Corrick pitching the GB Team to a 1-0 win over Italy in a dramatic final.
And Sant Boi was the setting for last night’s friendly game against Spain, an up-and-coming team in European softball and a country that will host one of the three Group Stage tournaments next year leading to the WBSC Women’s World Cup in 2024.
To play in one of those three Group Stage tournaments against teams from around the world – the others will be hosted in Italy and Ireland – GB will have to win a medal here, and so the bronze medal is the team’s minimum goal. GB won bronze at the last two European Women’s Championships in which we took part, in 2017 and 2019, but this time aspirations will be higher.
And yet, after three years and a European Women’s Championship that we missed in 2021 because of Covid restrictions on travel from Britain to Europe, how realistic are GB’s aspirations? What is the competition like now in Europe? Which teams have progressed and which have fallen behind?
All will be revealed when the tournament starts, in Softball Europe’s new format that means eight teams are already guaranteed a place in the second round and only four of the remaining 13 teams will join them after fighting through group games on Sunday.
GB, which hasn’t finished lower than fifth in a European Championship since 2001, will be among those fighting to get into the top group on Sunday because missing the Women’s Europeans last year meant our ranking plummeted. So on Sunday GB will play Turkey and then Ukraine in back-to-back games, and only two wins from those games will allow the team to enter the tournament proper.
GB v Spain
But all that lies ahead, and last night the opponent was Spain, a team in the top eight and already guaranteed a second-round place.
The GB Team had looked good during their week-long training camp at Farnham Park and Bisham Abbey, a blend of youth and experience with speed and defensive versatility. But training and scrimmaging against yourself is one thing; competition is another.
And competition, in this case, produced a professional and clinical 8-0 win over Spain, led by the pitching and defense.
The two GB pitchers – Amie Hutchison and then Kim Hobson – gave up just one hit and four baserunners in seven innings and none of those runners got beyond first base.
Amie Hutchison pitched three-and-two-thirds no-hit innings, and the only baserunner came when Amie hit the second batter of the game, Meritxell Blesa, with a pitch. But she was erased moments later on a stunning double play: Lauren Evans grabbed a high chop just over the bag at third base, fired a perfect strike to Morgan Salmon at second, and Morgan’s quick turn just beat the batter, Yaisey Sojo, at first.
After that, Amie was perfect until she gave way to Kim Hobson with two out and no one on base in the top of the fourth inning.
Amie’s domination of the Spanish line-up wasn’t about strikeouts, because there weren’t any. Instead, Amie induced six ground ball outs, including the double play, two infield pop-ups, one softly-hit line drive to shortstop, one fly ball to right field and just one hard-hit ball, a line drive off the bat of clean-up hitter Uxua Modrego that was grabbed by Lauren Evans at third.
And despite the fact that the local plate umpire gave Amie nothing on the corners for the first couple of innings, there were no walks.
Kim Hobson was almost as efficient in her three-and-a-third innings. Though she walked two and gave up Spain’s only hit of the game, a single up the middle by Estabaliz Alvarez leading off the fifth inning, Kim also induced a lot of ground balls and soft pop flies that were snapped up by a flawless and alert GB defense. For good measure, Kim also had a strikeout.
Offensively, GB put huge pressure on two Spanish pitchers, especially over the first five innings. Whereas Spain’s at-bats were short and quick, GB’s were long, with GB hitters working deep counts, fouling off pitches and hustling the Spanish defense into errors.
GB put runs on the board in each of the first five innings, including three in the bottom of the first. Singles by Kendyl Scott and Amie Hutchison brought in the runs, but only after Tia Warsop and Sydney Brown at the top of the order had used speed to pressure the Spanish defense into errors.
There were nine GB strikeouts over the course of seven innings, which will need some adjustments, but the Spanish pitchers also gave up nine hits, four walks and three hit-by-pitches, and GB runners stole three bases, with just one runner thrown out, which added up to a lot of pressure and a bunch of runs.
After taking that 3-0 lead in the top of the first inning, GB scored single runs in the second and third, two more in the fourth and a final run in the fifth. The two runs in the fourth inning came on a walk to Amie Hutchison and a long blast over the left field fence by Cameron McGinnis, who had just replaced Amy Moore at catcher.
The one element from the game that the coaches will look at critically was that GB should have had more runs, especially early in the game when they were piling the pressure on Spanish starter Raquel Fernandez. GB left two runners on base in the first inning and left the bases loaded in the second and third, which could be seen as opportunities wasted.
Overall, however, the coaches were more than pleased.
After the game, Head Coach Rachael Watkeys told the team, “For the first game we’ve played in three years, that was a really good outing. The pitchers did a great job, the fielding was really professional and we had some very good at-bats. It was an excellent start.”
There will be two more warm-up games this week for GB, who have arrived in Spain ahead of most other teams, as well as additional training sessions.
For a programme which is now receiving UK Sport funding, this tournament is the first step toward the team’s stated goal: to qualify for and medal at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
But that’s a long way off. The first objective is to take care of Turkey and Ukraine on Sunday.
Photos by Chris Knoblock