Paul Holden wrote:
A good presentation of the issues, right up to the penultimate
paragraph where you invoke "common sense", an entirely meaningless
concept. If you want to say that the Rules Committee should be allowed
to exercise their judgement then please do so. I would support you in
that. By using the phrase that you do you imply that anyone else using
their own judgement would obviously come to the same conclusion and
that just fundamentally undermines your argument. You also imply that
anyone who disagrees is displaying less than sense, which belittles
your argument. Believe in yourself, present your judgement as sound,
don't present it as a consensus of the "masses".
Sorry, not my intention at all. I didn't attempt to use 'common sense'
to mean anything particularly, I just don't like repeating phrases
unnecessarily, and I like the language to flow. I'd already used
'exercise judgement' so I switched up. Really no more than that.
I am also concerned that we have some very different situations under
discussion and that you imply that the balance between what you term
"common sense" and application of the rules should be the same in each
case. Is dealing a mistake in the rostering rules really an equivalent
situation to deciding to re-seed a team that did not perform in a
previous tournament? In one case you are using judgement to determine
an appropriate punishment for a breach of a rule, in another you are
using judgement to replace the rules.
Yes and no. The reason Kent were so low at tour 2 was that they were
unintentionally in breach of the rules - not enough women. They won
their games but forfeited.
Certainly if they'd just played badly we wouldn't have looked at it. I
know that you'd be in favour of saying 'bring more women then', as are a
number of others. That's pretty much the main point at issue - do we
look at any of these things, or do we just go by the rules? But in terms
of the similarity between this situation and rostering mistakes, I think
I'm within my rights to make the comparison.
Finally you do not touch at all on how the decisions being made impact
on the nature of the competition structure that is supposed to be in
place. My understanding is that the Tour is a series of linked events
where your performance in each is supposed to directly affect your
opportunities in the following event. If teams are to be re-seeded
based on their perceived strength at the start of each tournament why
are we even bothering with a Tour structure*? Hasn't a team that
finishes in the top 16 at Tour 1 earned the right to lose all their
games at Tour 2? Won't this probably leave them better off than losing
all their games from a reseeded 18th (say) and therefore give added
meaning to their efforts at the first event?
n.b. No-one was bumped down from the top 16 - Kent went from 18 to 17,
when they hoped to be moved up to 16. I understand why they're still
miffed, but I see the situation as slightly different.
Other than that, I agree completely. The question is whether this is
what everyone wants, and whether they're prepared to live with the
consequences. Personally, I'm hugely in favour of rigidly following the
rules, but I don't feel, from my correspondence, that this is the
universally popular way to go. The sport is small enough that we don't
necessarily have to end up with situations like Darren Fletcher missing
the Champions League final when it was obvious he didn't deserve to - we
can look at everything on an individual basis.
Whilst we remain a small sport, our onus is on making sure that every
player and every team has the best possible tournament experience,
because we simply want as many teams as possible and as many
opportunities as possible for players to play. This sometimes involves
compromises where a number of teams are slightly affected so as to
prevent one player/team from being seriously messed up. As the sport
grows, we will need to become more rigid, and there is a very open
question of how rigid we should be at any stage. I'll put you down as a
vote for rigidity, I guess? ;-)
B
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