THE governing body of match fishing has confirmed that the World Champs will now take place in Finland instead of the Europeans, on July 9th and 10th.

The venue will be the same deep shipping canal used when the country last held the event.

On that occasion France were the only country to work how to consistently catch the silver fish, and walked to an easy victory with Philippe Jean taking the gold medal.

“The bottom is strewn with huge boulders, making plumbing up a nightmare, and the trick then was to feed very little joker on top of one of the rocks, If you fished into the rocks you caught tiny ruffe, but above them the French caught roach,” said TF.com Gareth Purnell, who fished the match.

“The fact that cupping kits can now be used has moved the goalposts. The French did their pinpoint accurate feeding by hand. Now everyone can be as accurate.

“There were also some very bad areas. I recall Bob Nudd coming about 28th in his section. If I go I’ll be taking around 100 plummets!

Mark Downes, England coach, told TF.com that England would be attending although they had not made arrangements yet.

“It’s still a bit of a nightmare to get to, and we might just have to fly and swallow the excess luggage costs,” he said. “We learnt a lot last time and although we don’t have venues like the canal in the UK, as always we’ll fancy it with the quality of angler we have.”

TF has also learnt that Scotland will still not be attending. Squad member George Glen said: “We weren’t going to the Europeans and had given up on Moscow. Because of that we have committed to the Celtic Cup and the 6 Nations and have made other arrangements for July too, so I can’t see how we can back out and manage to get a team to Finland. 

“I know it’s the best solution in a bad situation but it’s still farcical to change the date of a World Champs with this little notice. Some teams will be happy, some teams like us won’t be able to manage.”