Varsity Day two - Indoors
After a social on Saturday night and a lazy Sunday morning around Oxford the competition continued indoors...
Lots of photos can be found on the SB facebook page - https://goo.gl/gPYFZW
Men 1st team
Cambridge 6-12 Oxford
(Author: JR)
Like last year, we hoped to follow up the outdoor loss with an indoors win, although without the benefit of the dominant Tejas to JR hammer option. The game was close at the beginning but it started to wrong for SB. The space that we had at Div 2 indoor nationals on the big 3G pitches was sorely missed when we were playing tougher Div 1 defense on a smaller indoors court. We never really managed to get our preferred flowing under-reset game going. Unfortunately, we weren’t hitting our deeps either. Oxford kept scoring and I don’t know whether it was the pressure of their defense, or the score, or the occasion, or bad luck, but we just kept turning over. We started to take a few more risks to try and get back in the game but, on the day, it just made things worse. Indoors can be cruel sometimes. We lost 12-6. Team: JR, Jonny, Perry, Adam, Mo, Noah, Henry, MC
Women 1st team
Cambridge 9-6 Oxford
(Author: May)
The game began with both teams playing with high intensity. Cambridge started on offense and put themselves on the scoreboard with some quick upline passes. The women continued the game with tight person defence and successfully shut down the under options, forcing Oxford to throw deep shots. Having practiced their ho-stack play several times it was beautiful to see the chemistry going on between each player, switching from handler to cutter and vice versa. The highlights of the game include: Katie’s sticky fingers catching several scores in the end zone. It was such a competitive display of women’s ultimate with a win to Cambridge 9-6. MVP: Katie (Kaiteeee)
Men 2nd team
Cambridge 11-5 Oxford
(Author: Bryan)
We came into the game trying to maintain our performance from our outdoors match. We played an honest man defence and a vert stack on offence. Oxford ran us hard, punishing any loose marks with up the line cuts from their handlers and the occasional overhead. Both teams had a shaky start, with miscommunication on the throws and a few drops. However, our experience over their team showed, and we developed a small lead at 7-4. After that, we started taking away their strike cuts, to great success. Cambridge played a cleaner, smoother offence and the tighter marking lead to the final score of 11-5 in Cambridge’s favour. Team: Bryan, Theo, Fisher, Ravi, Mark, Aimeric, Yibs
Women 2st team
Cambridge 11-1 Oxford
(Author: Karla/Catherine )
SBW2 pulled off an exceptional performance during their indoors Varsity match, coming out strong and maintaining the high level of energy and focus throughout. Part-way through the game, WOW2 began threatening the deep option a bit more, and although there were some great runs with near completions, SBW2 quickly adjusted their defence to shut down this strategy. Strong SB defence (both on force, and marking cutters) against WOW’s primarily side-stack offence meant that WOW handlers were often struggling for options. All in all, some solid defence and fluid offence, combined with the previous experience of playing together as a team at Indoor Regionals, gave SB a complete advantage of the scoreboard: the final score was a very well-deserved 11-1. MVP: Stella
Mixed
Cambridge 9-6 Oxford
(Author: Jonny)
Cambridge came out quickly to take a 3-1 lead with strong person defence and calm offence. Oxford pulled the score back to 5-5, but SB managed to step up the defence once again to see out the game. Humaira and JR were constant threats downfield and Elsa provided clinical handling. Mixed MVP: Elsa
