Tuesday 08 May 2007
We were: Rob, Stu, Kenny, Dave B, Dav, Rosh, Giac, Matt D, C-Lo, Mike, Beavan, Caesar, CB.
We started as 13th seeds. The format meant we were in a pool of teams seeded from 13 down to 30-ish. We had to win this pool to get a last 16 knock-out against 4th seeds. Pretty tough.
We started on Friday with wins against the WCU Staff and Gummi Bears from Germany. We played pretty well. Dav played both games but then had to sit the rest of the tournament with his exploded hamstring.
Saturday we played pretty well again and beat CamboCakes from Amsterdam. So, we soundly beat all three teams from our pool, who were all pretty athletic and could have caused us problems.
The team in Copenhagen minus Mike who was busy with the slowest Camera in the world
This set up a knock-out game against Ragnarok, who we had watched Skoggs neat pretty convincingly the night before. I think we went 3-0 down, although as I recall it was a tight, running game rather than the usual Danish huck-fest. We THEN managed to smarten up our act and force some mistakes from them, although we ended the first half 7-4 (or possibly 7-5). We had a big push at the start of the second half to get to 8-7 down, then played the point from hell... Our D team and their O team shared about 16 chances to score. We must have had the disc blocked or dropped in the endzone at least three times and they overthrew their receivers four or five times. The thing seemed to last forever and eventually they managed to put it in for 9-7. Offence scored next and at some point the cap came on, game to ten, and we lost out 10-8.
Ragnarok ended up in the final, but losing this game put us out of the top eight. I'm pretty sure that if we'd managed to score that point from hell, we would have won the game.
Next we had to play old enemies Orebro from Sweden, this time to stay in the 9-12 bracket. Again, we had a lapse in the middle of the first half, and ended up 7-4 down at halftime. Afterwards we talked about eliminating this and pushing right through to half-time, something we managed to do pretty well on Sunday. Anyway, we came back well at the start of the second half and levelled the game. We ended up in sudden death and lost 11-10 (I think).
Two more games on Sunday, which we had to win to retain the seeding we were so disappointed with at the start of the tournament. We beat UFO from Finland in what seemed like an arsey game and which ended in more sudden death. Then we beat Freespeed from Switzerland in yet another sudden death shoot-out. We probably should have beaten both comfortably, but by now we were down to the traditional Chevron 10 or 11 players thanks to injuries to Rosh and Chris. Nonetheless it was good to come away with two wins.
The final was a strange affair. Skoggs v Ragnarok again. Skoggs went 5-0 up and the Ragnarok, who looked dead, came back to 5-4. It seemed tight from there but Skoggs ran away comfy winners in the end.
In conclusion:
- Giac deservedly won the MVP vote
- Caesar failed to arouse a random chap at the party, thus failing to pass
on the team groove.
- We discovered that Matt D is pure evil.
- We left feeling positive
Rob Mitchell