Brighton Student Regional Indoors 2002 - 2nd Team Report

At the unearthly hour of 6am on Saturday, the combined forces of Strange Blue 1 and 2 set off for Brighton and the regional qualifiers for indoor nationals. This is an account of what the second team got up to.

Firstly, the team:

Dave Eaton
Rich Sutton
Tido
Brookes
Kurt
Benton
Bradley
Anders

As is understandable after having been made to get out of bed at 5:30 in the morning, we were feeling a little delicate when we took to the pitch for our first match at 9:00. It turned out that we were playing our most important match first, against the Mohawks first team. If we were to make the top half of the draw on Sunday we would have to finish 2nd in our group, and as 3rd seeds of the group we needed an upset against one of the two teams above us in order to achieve this.

Mohawks looked even more rusty than ourselves in the early stages of the game, and we had plenty of scoring chances. unfortunately, we made a few bad passes near the endzone, and failed to capitalize on their sloppines. As the game progressed, the more experienced Mohawks players began to wake up and consequently we found ourselves losing several quick points. We stepped up our defence, and got a lot of turnovers, but our lack of experience both as individuals and a team meant that our offence never really got going. We ended up losing 7-2, but knew that the game was much closer than the score suggested.

The second game was against Disc Doctors B, the bottom seeds of our group. We managed to win this game with little trouble, as our patience on disc had improved vastly from the first game. Brookes, Benton and Kurt in particular were making their presence felt when on D, giving us the turnovers we needed to take the first 6 points without reply. The final score was 8-1, and we were all a lot happier with how we'd played.

The final group game was against STD. We knew that, as 3rd seeds, these would be a very testing opposition. If we were to beat them and progress into the top eight then we'd need to be on top of our game and the opposition to play below their best. Unfortunately it wasn't to be, as our opponents seemed fairly keen to keep their position at the top of our group. We managed to keep up our own hard defence, but the patience that had been evident on offence in the Disc Doctors game went missing when we were confronted by some very intense defence from the STD players. It would have been a major upset if we had won this match, but we felt that if we had played as well as we knew we could then the score-line would have been a little more favourable than 2-10.

Saturday evening followed the standard Curry + pub + party format, and was very restrained compared to some previous tournaments. Despite the presence of the infamous Nicole of Mohawks, Rich T didn't have to spend any time hiding behind speakers, and nobody disgraced themeselves through excessive drinking. Shame.

The first game on Sunday morning was, typically, at 9:00. Fortunately (?) our opponents failed to turn up in time for the start of the game, so we found oursleves 12-0 (1 min late = 1 point for opponents) up by the time they had a team together. We played a pick-up game in the meantime in order to blow away the early morning cobwebs. The official final score was 15-1, putting us through to the plate semi-final.

We now faced STD 2. Having been beaten comprehensively by their first team on Saturday, we were keen to make amends in this match and progress to the plate final. It was clear from the start that this was going to be a close match. STD had a couple of very solid handlers and quick players throughout the team, and were definitely psyched up for the game. However, everyone on our team seemed to lift their game for the occasion. The now familiar defensive intensity was again in evidence, with the difference from previous games being the flow when we got possession of the disc. Dave, Anders, Tido and Rich were handling solidly to frustrate and tire their defence, and we ended up winning convincingly (9-4?).

In the plate final we faced Surrey Slingers, the team which SB1 had destroyed 15-0 on the first day. They were playing iron-man and carrying injuries, which was encouraging as far as we were concerned. Unfortunately they decided to adopt a zone defence, which we were unaccustomed to facing and unable to break through easily. Though we had a large share of the possession, and made it to their end-zone regularly, we didn't possess the guile to score past their wall at the back. We ended up losing 6-3, and therefore moving up one place from our original seeding of 11th.

The weekend was great fun, and there is plenty of promise for good results in the future for Strange Blue's reserve squad.

If you've read this far, well done. This is a lot longer than I intended to make it. Reward yourselves with an 'alternative' review of the weekend at www.weebl.jolt.co.uk. I think it sums our exploits up quite well.

Cheers

Rich

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