A Canadian girls' hockey team, Gatineau Dynamites, have been kicked out of a boys’ hockey tournament after they were two good for their male counterparts.

When spotting the fact of a female team being kicked out of a boys’ tournament you would typically assume it’s due to a gender divide or perhaps a lack of equality but this wasn’t to be the case.

The incident also clashed ironically with ‘International Women’s Day’ - not exactly the finest timing.

However, sadly the team consisting of seven and eight-year-old girls had already paid and much to the girls’ heartbreak they weren’t given the chance to compete.

With there being no girls’ hockey league in the region of Gatineau, should we see this as a success for women’s sport as they are that good or a downfall because they were blocked from playing?

Well here’s the problem, the Dynamites were placed in the ‘C Division’ of the boys’ league for the tournament. In their exhibition game, they beat the Gatineau Cougars boys’ team 7-0.

To give an indication of how much better the Dynamites are than the other teams competing in the tournament, the Cougars advanced to a championship game and only lost that 4-1 against a side from St-Constant.

The Hockey Gatineau president, Luc Gauthier, has, unsurprisingly, received a lot of criticism following the event.

“The thing I want people to understand is we did not want to get rid of a female team,” said Gauthier.

“We got rid of a team with a bad classification.

“I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, because I had no room in the B level and I was not going to make one pool with more teams and another one with just four because people would have moaned over an injustice. There’s not much I could do.

“I apologised [to the Dynamites] about a thousand times. If I was in their shoes I’d have felt the same way.”