Strange Blue Tournament Report

A Couple of weekends ago SB2 took a team to Tour 2 in Burton-on-Trent. Here's some words reporting what happened there:

Having managed to get sufficient lifts / cars / tents we arrrived variously on Friday night and Saturday morning having had the misfortune to watch one of several dire England football performances. The venue itself came with some decent pitches, a biker bar and some drunk England fans.

Our first game was against Reading Dragons. We'd had close games against them at Tour 1. It was the same here - we exchanged points, helped by a medium wind blowing straight down the pitch and a rapidly improving 4-2-1 zone (and the odd speculative huck). Although we generally made more progress upwind before turning over than they did, they won in sudden death and eventually finished 3rd in C Tour, despite having only 1 or 2 subs.

We then soundly beat Devon 3 and improved our play in the wind. Next up GB U17. We had been worried about taking on sprightly and organised youngsters and were jubilant when following sustained pressure from our zone Sam laid out for the first of 2 callahan scores. In the end we won comfortably but they looked dangerous on Sunday in less wind.

We needed to win both remaining games to come top 2 in our group and get into the top 8. We narrowly lost against a solid York team (who eventually finished 2nd in C tour) and then lost against Curve in a tired last-game-of-the-day. They had 5 match points and we managed to get three in a row to give them a scare and showed our quality but still lost.

There was no party as such on the Saturday evening but that didn't stop some of us getting drunk at the campsite and going to the playground. Our noisyness clearly upset some of the other campers, but this was all made good by singing a round of "We. Are. Fully Charged. We are Fully Charged."

Having been deposited in the 8-16 group by some of the best teams at the tournament we spent Sunday in slightly lighter wind showing that we were a pretty classy team. We won our first 2 games against Kent Mustang and Limited Release 2 to come up against Curve again in the 9-10 plate final (although there was no plate). It was another close game but by now we'd found everyone's strengths, from Token's tireless running (he must have been top scorer in our team), great link up play from Will, and Spence, great hucking from Joe and Rich, great D from Chris, to mention just some of the team. It was a great team effort and we managed to pull away from Curve towards the end to secure a well-deserved victory. Bring on Tour 3!

Safe journey home,

Your loving co-captains Piers and Rich