Sheffield Indoors 2003 - Beginners Team

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Sheffield Tournament report

It all started at the ungodly hour of 6am as a blearily looking bunch of strange blues set off for the tournament Italian-Job style. One petrol stop and a couple of salty double sausage and egg McMuffins each later, we arrived a bit late for the first novice match of the day at 9am.

Things started off rather badly; on arrival we found that we were going to be pairing up with the cool Southampton Skunks team, but couldn’t actually recognize any of them! As soon as we’d found the team things started inauspiciously when Ed quickly got onto the field, picked up the opposition’s pull, put in a soft pass and promptly lost a point. Most of us were still pretty woolly after the trip, and in general the first game wasn’t particularly memorable, although we managed to fight back and ended in style with one of the Skunks’ Hat players throwing a hammer the entire length of the pitch as the final buzzer sounded, which was snatched out of the air by their ridiculously tall catcher (Dave?), allowing us to pull off an unexpected last minute draw.

After the game we immediately got to know the rest of the team better, playing a range of games and calls such as the memorable ‘Skunks invaders’. As we got to know each other better, running some forehand and hammer drills in the squash courts, we started to become more of a team worthy of the competition. We decided that although Skunks had to concede all their games, we’d actually play them all as friendlies, so pretty soon on Saturday we’d got our style of play sorted out: fast, close man to man marking, relying on long Hammers from the Skunks Hats or Ed to get us out of high count situations. The only problem with our plan was that the Skunks had brought 4 Hats, so the play on the pitch was sometimes rather disjointed as each player lead with a different style, sometimes leaving the rest of us a bit confused whether to be looking for long hammers or short cuts as the main method of scoring.

On the first day we only lost to strong teams from Leeds and Warwick, both of whom played the same Hat most of the match and had very fit teams. However, great ‘in your face’ defence from Michael and Fraser, as well as Tom using his height to block hammers and defend the end zone, ensured that we didn’t get mauled by anyone. Even better we’d won all our official Strange blue games, going into the second day seeded second!

Having played twice as many games as anyone else that day, the SB novices were naturally up for some light entertainment in the evening – what we got was a confused melee of bars and drinking games, one involving Matt putting his shoes on his head, and just general mayhem. While some people slunk off to crash on the couches or molest the local ladies (you know who you are), the rest of us grabbed the stage on the Union Dance floor at the ‘Pop Tarts’ evening and refused to be budged. After that, the ladies came like flies and the SB novices had to fight them off… at least that’s how I remember it. Perhaps the best moment of the night was at the end when the novices surrounded one of the Hats who’d pulled, giving the poor girl a hell of a fright!

Next morning everyone managed to drag themselves out of bed on a pretty cold day for another round of ultimate, but this time it was serious. We had everything to play for, and the day started with an extremely hard fought game against Leeds to go through to the next round. Leeds took the lead early on with a very talented team, throwing lots of small hammers to break our man to man defence. However, we didn’t let up and the game went on in a point to point fashion, everyone was absolutely keyed up and nerves began to show when points stretched for 4 or 5 minutes. I don’t remember much of this game other than there being lots of forced and unforced mistakes from both teams, as everyone tried their best to score.

Our tendency to hammer the disc when under pressure didn’t do as well as the previous day as most teams had come to expect it, and most of the team were still a bit sleepy from the night before. I think I remember Mark putting in one of two massive aerial defence moves, and some clever cuts from the team allowed us to score some great points from long inside-out forehands. As we all got the hang of the disc, we started for dumps and cuts in a much more organized way than before. About this time I went up for a mega grab in the middle, and came down on my coxis, so I spent much of the rest of the day hobbling around the sports hall with a leaking bag of ice down my pants, which wasn’t all that funny (for me at least).

Although we won the Leeds game in sudden death, the next game turned into a thrashing as we lost to a very good team from Warwick (the bears).Not much to say about it really, none of us really started playing till well into the final 10 minutes, and although we pulled back a number of points, everyone’s faces told the same story – 3rd was the best we could do now.

We played a few more friendly games during the afternoon, but the strain of the extra games was starting to show in tired faces and injured knees. As the final game against Hulltimate started we were keen to get the third podium place, although our play during the afternoon had become a bit ragged. The final game was agonizingly close, neither team would give the slightest respite to the other, the defence from both sides was really tight and everyone was putting in 110%. While we took the first point, they responded quickly with two and it took us a very long time to draw equal again at 2-2. There was some confusion with the scoreboard after that, but the upshot of it was on the final whistle we dumped the disc and cheered, it turned out that the points were equal and Hulltimate managed to score in sudden death, despite a desperate wall defence of the endzone.

As Michael said, “we almost cried”. All in all we’d had a great weekend, playing with the Skunks was probably the best decision all weekend giving us more game time and also a really good team spirit. Finishing 4th out of 16 was a pretty good result for us, and everyone should be proud of it!

Cheers,

Ed

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