Strange Blue Tournament Report

University Womens' Indoor Regionals

Greetings, Splendid Bouquets,

The tournament: Uni women's indoor regionals, Sheffield, 7/8th November 1999 - oops, I mean 2009. The team: Jo "Catchem" Maddison, Megan "Misty" Davies Wykes, Laura "Meowth" Fletcher, Kinga "Poke-dot" Egressey, Natalie "Pikachu" Lewis, Susanna "Oddball" Bidgood and me, Jassy "Rocket" Drakulic.
The seeding: 2nd
The final placing: 5th, but we were stiffed by the system.

The haps: We played super hard man D, we used some unchoreographed intellectual poaching to nab even more sweet Ds and we ran everyone ragged with our super-hardcore lady asses. We broke their marks all over the place, we caught hotly contested upside down discs, we ran through our charging endzone cuts and the scores reflected our totally sweet flow. We beat everyone in our pool convincingly, except for one tragic game against our deepest darkest nemesis: WOW (oxford ladies)

WOW: final score 4-3... their star player, the beastly traitor, Magali Kostov..! Oh Magz, how could you ;) We had had a big ol' chat about our zone D that wasn't particularly well defined yet, and decided to have a play with our clam-type system during the early phases against WOW. This allowed some points trading, with them leading, going to 3-2. Then tragedy struck... Laura received an Oxford elbow to the neck and was totally floored, in excruciating pain, waiting for first aid to do something to help. The team was horrified, Laura was in agony, and Kinga was enraged by the lack of overtly expressed sympathy from the offender. Laura eventually was assisted in being moved away so the game could resume. Oxford began with the disc, and from the long ten-minute static scored quickly, making it 4-2. SB put away a clinical point to bring it to 4-3, still one point down, less than one minute remaining. The ladies got the D and made a cracking play to Megan int he endzone but the defender got a finger to it to block the equaliser. Another quickly acquired D returned SB to possession once more, for a second incredible endzone bid with less than 20 seconds remaining. Nat cut for the zone, Susanna with the disc on the right sideline put a lovely roll-curve forehand into the middle but Nat was cutting for a bolt-up-the-line score... It looked like there was a follow up cut in the vicinity to swoop into the space and collect the score still... but it didn't come. We didn't equalise. We had been robbed of our deserved (*my opinion only, but presumably that of the team too :P) victory and thus came out second in our pool.

What this meant: proceeding to day 2 as 8th seed (again, this wouldn't have been such a tragedy if we'd been in a different pool where 2nd place was 5th, 6th or 7th even) so had the 1v8 crossover to play first on Sunday morning. That's right, you can guess who it was: those bloody Bears. They beat us at everything, but they're so damn nice you just can't hate 'em! Rob Schumacher, our chauffeur and coach, tried to convince us to believe we could dick on them, and we had some ritual anti-bear trash talking going down that sure as hell made us psyched up to give em a hard run for their money... But I still didn't believe that we'd win. It'd have to be one of those miracle moments, and I think we used all of ours up last year when we came 1st.

PARTY!! The club was 90s themed, and as a team we dressed in our finest Pokemon attire, including some Poke-Trainers, Pikachu, Meowth and a member of Team Rocket. We opened the dance floor and we never left it until sore feet and flagging stamina drove us towards bed and traditional scandal exposing chit-chat (as is the way with women's indoor tournaments... although the most eye-opening revelations from any team member came the following day during a true stories type call, to our surprise!).

The Sunday haps: We played Bears, lost 8-5 in a tight game that had potential 'lucky breaks' for both teams, but Bears actually scored theirs and we jammed it, therefore didn't (sorry about those knives, Fletcher, Bidgood :S). All in all, they were struggling to edge in front, and we gave them a really tough crossover (which later had implications for their subsequent matches when up against teams who had an easier time of their crossovers! It just wasn't proper, see!). Losing meant the highest we could come was 5th, which we succeeded in achieving by pwning everyone else we played. Three solid victories in a row. We dealt with a team that showed unnecessarily high levels of physicality, a team who's long threat was hot to trot, and I a team who are renowned for their athleticism and nippy cutting but none of them were any match for us. We didn't concede more than 2 or 3 points for any match that followed. Our D was primarily to blame, we just shut them down with our incredible man-marking, impenetrable forcing and our intimidating war-painted faces :)

That was that, we qualified, but we will be missing some very helpful hands for nationals come December unfortunately. But maybe Sonja (who was injured on Thursday in the last minute of practice!!! ) will be able to play by then, so perhaps we can go dominate there without being robbed of our deserved ranking. In hindsight, I bet we could have taken the Bears... We lost the game for ourselves more than they won it, had it not been 1st thing it could have been a completely different game. In fact, overall I reckon we should have won the whole thing. But I'm clearly biased ;)

Jassica x

OH!!
AND WE WON SPIRIT!!!
(well, joint 1st with Aye-Aye :D)

Yessssssssssssss!!!