Britdisc, Here is a personal view of the Chevron mixed performance and results in Hawaii for anyon interested:
Summary: Seeded 18th out of 40, we finished 15th (3rd European team) having one a game and lost a game every day (6 wins, 6 losses overall) First pool - days 1 & 2 Had a tough pool of 5 temas which we needed to finish in the top 3 to stay in the top 24. Just won our first game against KLO (Canada) about 16-13 (sorry I won't get all the scores spot on). Hard work and not a lot in it but we played just well enough to hold on. Second game we were comfortably outplayed by the number 2 seeds Blue Ridge Ultimate (from Virginia and elsewhere in US). The final score was 17-7 but all 7 of our points were hard work to earn. As Si Hill has already noted about the US "style" they were pretty physical and the game was not that enjoyable. Our 3rd pool game was against Clac-Clac from France. It rained during the game which helped heat wise but with a fairly strong wind was not condusive to the best ultimate. Incidentally the wind was a pretty consistent 10-20 mph crosswind in every game played during the week. All pitches were aligned the same way and all day the wind blew across them. We lost about 16-12 which was a big disappointment as we had targeted them as a game we could win (in the last game of the tournament we took our revenge however). Our offence was not as good as it could be and a few calls went against us. They were the only other team we played who would occasionally choose to play 4 women (a tactic that we used throughout the tournament on around 90% of our offence points) The loss to Clac-Clac left us needing to beat the Danish team in out pool in the last game. They had had the same results as us so far (slightly better scorelines too) so we knew it would be tough. As we later showed in our final 2nd round pool game we were a very good side under this kind of pressure. We took a good lead and they struggled against our junk defence. They made a number of mistakes and we capitalised to open up around a 4 point lead. They then hit a patch of form and took a run of points to give us a late scare but I think we still won by around 3, lets say the final score was 17-14. They were a very good spirited team and I think we all had a good time. So third place in our pool which went entirely to seeding despite all the games not involving Blue Ridge being very tight. ROUND 2 Third place meant we were in with 2 pool winners (Otis - South West USA, High Plains Drifters - Colorado, USA), 2 runners up (Inochi - Japan, Idle Hands - Canada) and another 3rd place team (Sweet As - NZ). First up we played High Plains Drifters. They too were physical and not a lot of fun to play against (although like BRU they were charming off the pitch). They were very confident and shot into a 9-4 first half lead (and as with BRU those 4 points were hard work!). We were determined not to concede any games and re-iterated this at half time. We came back very strongly to take the next 3 points, and as far as I am concerned the next as well. A strange call took that point of the scoreboard and instead of 9-8 and on a roll it went to 10-7. We kept it up for a bit more but at the end they strung together some points - our men were tiring - and we lost 17-10. Next game was against the pre-tournament number 3 seeds Inochi from Japan. They had a squad of 32(!) and it was great to see them pre game laughing and joking with each other. They seemed delighted to be there. For some reason they seized up against us after a reasonable start. We played junk and although they made a lot of passes they made very little distance. We also picked up all the high disks (this was probably the only team we played that we could beat height wise). For the only time in the week I felt it was too easy. At the end they suddenly came back from 15-6 down to take 4 in a row (I think) before we finished off 17-10. They were a top side spirit wise. The post game calls went on for a very long time rounded off by a mammoth photo session (most of our games were characterised by these long photo shoots). Day 2 of the second round started off against Idle Hands from Canada. They had lost both their games so far and we went on to beat them too. However we scraped it on sudden death with a layout score from Sara. We had seen an early 4 point lead (5-1) wiped out by a 7 point losing string to go into half time behind. It took a long comeback to win the game. One guy on their team made a lot of disappointing calls but the rest were pretty good and they accepted the loss with good grace. It showed the standard of the competition that Idle Hands lost all 5 games in the second round. 2nd game was against Sweet As from NZ. Looking back it's hard to remember that I was pretty confident before the game. We were rubbish and they were great. They beat us 17-7 thanks to their key men playing superbly well and our offence being shocking. They went on to finish 7th (top 6 were all US sides). That night we still had the number 1 ranked side in our second round pool still to play and I assumed we were out of the tournament but safely in the 9-16 region. However Sammy knew all the other results and it turned out that our pool of six had one team that had won all 4, one that had lost all 4 and 2 teams with 2-2 records. The 4 teams in the middle could all finish anywhere from 2nd to 5th (and therefore 1st to 24th overall). These 4 teams had all beaten each other and amazingly none of the games had been close. The next morning we had added incentive (against Otis - USA) and went out and played our game of the tournament winning 15-12. They were a great team to play against and the spirit was excellent both during the game and afterwards in another insanely long post-game chat. Both teams were now hanging on the result of the Sweet As-Inochi game to decide our final positions. If Inochi won we would be in the quarter finals. Unfortunately Inochi lost 13-12 having been 12-10 up which left us 3rd in the pool. Our final 3 play off games saw us 17-11 to Fingers from Switzerland (which ended our hopes of being top European team)and then lose sudden death to Sumo from Canada. Both games featured long runs of points. We came from 9-4 down against Fingers at half to level at 11-11 before throwing away the last 6! Final game of the tournament gave us revenge against Clac-Clac 14-8 (from 8-8). They seemed even more tired than us. 15th out of 40. MVP was Al Don (fractionally ahead of Sue Pioli and Claire Parker) Congratulations if you've read all that! Wayne Chevron mixed __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pootle.near.me.uk/mailman/listinfo/britdisc
