Quick response.
At 11:50 14/02/2007, you wrote:
What happens if a team doesn't go to Tour 0? Do they get relegated to the
B tour? Even if they finished in the A tour at nationals?
Yes. (At least I assume so - Si?)
Does this mean that the Tour is now back up to 4 events (except for the
arbitrary top 4 teams). But the first event is two months in advance of
the others. Even though many people were in favour of a shorter tour and
compacted tour.
The date is perhaps not ideal, but other than that: most of the lower
teams were happier with four tour events, and only the super-athletic
worlds-bound top teams wished to play three. Obviously there are
exceptions in both directions, but the consensus was for four events
for the lower teams.
I would appreciate a more full explanation of this system and why it is
needed. Is this progress?
The old system had two teams promoted per tour.
Let's imagine that Fire and Clapham decide that they're too cool for
school these days. They disband, and three new london teams, all of
easily a-tour standard, suddenly appear. Under the old system, only
two of them could be promoted at tour 1. The third team would have to
wait until tour 2 to get promoted, and in fact would only be able to
play A-tour at tour 3 - only one event. The alternative would be to
seed teams on subjective criteria rather than last year's results -
'They're clearly good enough' - which is a can of worms of epic proportions.
That's perhaps a frivolous idea, but the principle is sound - teams
do fold, improve, weaken, appear, all the time. Abstract two years
ago were A tour at tour 1, despite the fact that many of our best
players had left. We took someone else's spot for that first tour,
which, with only 3 tours, doesn't seem right. Not only that, but we
nearly avoided relegation - there were 3 teams in A-tour that time
who probably didn't deserve to be there. Also, Discuits finished 9th
last year at nationals (from memory - maybe the year before) despite
not being promoted until after tour 2.
The obvious answer to A-tour/B-tour seeding issues is to have the
first tour completely open. Unfortunately, the whole point of split
tours was to enable venues to deal with the large number of teams.
So, the original idea of tour 0 was to guarantee the top 8 teams an
A-tour spot, and let everyone else play-off for the remaining 8
spots. This satisfies the twin goals of having a first, open
tournament without an outrageous number of teams, and letting the top
players have the shorter season they wanted.
It's now become only the top 4 teams, which I'm not absolutely 100%
in agreement with, but the principles are basically the same. There
are now 12 A-tour spots up for grabs at tour 0, meaning that by the
time we get underway properly, a sensible seeding should be in place.
I suspect that the biggest problem for many teams will be the early
place in the calendar for tour 0, meaning some squads which are
aiming to peak for tour 1 must play a lot earlier than intended.
Hopefully, in future years this date can be moved, but even as it
stands it doesn't override the reasoning behind the whole tour 0 idea.
And of course, there's the biggest reason for tour 0 - it got voted
in at conference. QED.
Benji
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