Strange Blue Tournament Report

University Indoor Regionals

Hello

Last Weekend Strange Blue sent a team to Nottingham to compete in the Midlands Indoor Regionals.

Players attending were:
Paul
Rob
Pedro
Martin
Mark Ioffe
Myself
Tom Cope
Natman
Magic
Hammad.

We were seeded 5th out of 20 teams, and were the second seed in our pool on the first day. We played 7 games over the weekend, lost one (technically we lost this game twice) and came 3rd, qualifying for Indoor Nationals.

We Partyed harder than most teams (but not ARU - legends!), notably Bears, who stayed home and played scrabble (true story) and we totally restored some guy from Aye-Aye's faith in Frisbee - Sweet!

Saturday

Pool Match 1:

SB v Demons 2 - Win 15 or something to 1

We played this match with 2 alternating lines taking it in turns to play a couple of points. The opposition were apparently lost somewhere in Nottingham, so 5 of their 1st team kindly offered for us to play against them while we waited. We racked up 3 goals to 1 before the second team turned up, and then comfortably kept scoring.

Pool Match 2:

SB v Staffs 2 - Win by about 20 to 2

Our match against the bottom seeds in our pool, played as another warm up game with lines taking it in turns to play a couple of points. The other team only had 5 players, but still managed to take a couple of points off us as our D wasn't great from the beggining. We won by a big margain, not the largest of the day, but still pretty huge for a 23 minute match

Pool Match 3:

SB v Demons 1 - Win 8-7

Demons 1 had put pressure on us with their zone at the beggining of the first match of the day, but it hadn't quite come together for them. They brought it against us a bit better this time, and we didn't stretch them enough, so there wasn't enough space in the middle of the pitch. Our D wasn't awesome either, but we managed to scrape the win. This was the first game that we started to alternate lines as it was a bit more intense.

Pool Match 4:

SB v Aye-Aye SB Win by some margain (possibly 11-4, but I think I made that up)

We came out hard, and although the first few points were traded, when we got it together, we stretched out a lead. Our D was good in this match, and we were getting a bit more long play working on O. for the call, we repeated the call from last year's game to go against Aye Aye - players line up with their feet apart and a disc is thrown through their legs and caught one handed at the other end. Paul took the opportunity to Goat Brain the Aye Aye thrower, although it didn't really seem to put him off.

We Won our group fairly comfortably, other notable things from the first day include Paul's Gourmet lunch of sundried tomatoes and goats cheese and Natman deciding to abandon the Mathmo look and ditching the beige shorts in favour of some black Lookfly ones.

In the evening we took a trip to Pasta Hut, Rob and I made a valliant effort at a seriously substantial meal - shared starter platter, a lasagne each, a shared chicken caesar salad, and a large pizza between us, unfortunately the greasiness of the pizza brought us to a halt before we could finish it.

Then we hit the party, we snuck in a bottle of Vodka, and a person! Rob was wearing tracksuit bottoms, so wasn't going to get past the bouncers, so Mark hid in the toilets, handed his jeans to Paul, and they were passed on to Rob outside and he was allowed in. This effort prompted some guy from Aye Aye (as mentioned before) to tell us that we had restored his faith in Frisbee.

We were the only quarter finals team at the party.

Then Pedro did some shots!!!! (although he only drank a tenth of the amount of Sambuca as Guns from ARU) people played drinking games, partial nudity happened, including pedro walking though a bunch of people with his ass out and Paul giving Pedro (and the unfortunate girl sat next to him) the Holy Grail.

Then we hit the dance floor, people started leapfrogging; Pedro harmlessly cleared Rob, and then I managed to land on Pedro's neck - apparently the no-handed leapfrog is not a feasible manouvre, and I had to discover this by injuring on of the main handlers - BIG OOOPS!

We got a taxi (at a sensible time) back to the house we were staying at, Tom Cope wanted to know what a Holy Grail was, so Mark Ioffe decided the best time to pull his trousers down was just before the taxi driver told us we were there and turned the lights on. If you don't know what a holy grail is, just ask Mark.

Sunday

Luckily, my efforts to scupper the team failed, and Pedro was able to play all of the matches.

Quarter final:

SB v Bears - Loss 8 - 4

We played hard, and traded out the first few points, it was a pretty close game, but it was always likely that a team that trains indoors every week would beat a team that had only played indoors for a week. After the match, they very nearly ended up playing chicken with Mark Ioffe, but luckily we were avoided that.

3 v 4:

SB v Jesters - win

We sharpened up our D for this game, and it was quite easy in the end, can't remember the scoreline.

2 v 3:

Walkover

Technically speaking, we lost this game to bears because the result from the quarter final counted, what actually happened was, we watched the Bourne Identity, pretty sweet!

3 v 4 again game to go:

SB v BUF - SB win

We played really hard D in this match, so did BUF, it was a very high paced and hard fought game, with a lot of hammers and blades going over people, we won by a few points, but it was still pretty close.

Afterwards Pedro gave us an inspirational speech about how he was going to cut some players from the team before nationals, it was really beautiful.

Everybody played really well this weekend, Magic connected with Rob and Pedro connected with Paul for long shots, Magic scored a callahan, I D'ed a callahan opportunity (oops) lots of people made sweet plays.

overall it was a totally sweet tournament, and we totally did a load of totally sweet stuff and played some totally sweet frisbee.

Awesome

Sam