Beautiful sunny weather for the third or fourth year in row at this tournament and the panda-like white skin around my eyes showed up where my shades had been in place all day. See the photos on Facebook for evidence of the blue skies. We had 15 or 16 players from Cardiff City and entered two teams with two or three Dragons to make up the numbers.
A 9:30 am registration was early enough for a Saturday morning and we arrived in time for this. We then split randomly into two teams named Cardiff City and Itchy as one of the default scratch team names that.
Bristol City had amusingly named “Itchy and Scratchy�.
Aidan captained Itchy and his account of what happened to them follows:
Hmmmm…. Well, we lost to pretty much everyone in the morning (I think it was Castle and Highbury) and then drew against someone else. The afternoon was a bit better… we hammered Horfield, before going on to play some other teams. Thinking about it, that’s about all I remember about the day, other than the fact that we had a nice gazebo to hide under, and the sun was very hot, and that the definition of a biscuit is that it has to be double baked (as apposed to a cake which is single baked).
Sorry I cant be much more use than that!
That’s alright Aidan you might win an award for comedy write-up of the year.
Team Itchy
City managed to get on the pitch only a few minutes before the start of their first game, next time we’ll have a proper warm-up. We had also yet to realise that we were in the “group of deathâ€?, including the overall winners (named Dragons or something – sour grapes? Well, a bit, but we were better placed in and the overall 2nd placed team Pure Magic (who aren’t quite as good as their name suggests but they had a good percentage of goals per attempt). Dragons in the first game seemed like a good way to start the tournament, with a win, but we couldn’t get the ball through the korf although we had many attacks and near misses. We ended up 3-1 down at the end of the game.
Cardiff City
The next game was against Pure Magic, a strong side with players who had played for the Great Britain Student team, average height was about 50% more than ours, one guy in particular had an Inspector Gadget like reach that fooled most of us at some point in the game – keep him away from the post! Again, we couldn’t get the goals although we had the opportunities. They, on the other hand, took their opportunities and ended up 6-1 or 5-1 up at the end, scoring practice is what we needed.
Oxford City next and as usual they had a good team, our consistent near misses were again a feature of the game and we ended up 5-1 down. One game left out of the pool games and we managed to start scoring more often against a fairly strong Bristol Uni side. We drew 3-3 and we were last in the group but with a few goals at least.
After lunch in the new pool games for places 13-18 we were drawn against Horfield 2 first. At last an opportunity to run rings around someone and we all enjoyed winning 5-0 or 6-0, now we felt a bit more like we were playing korfball. A game against Cardiff Uni followed that was closely matched until a few minutes before the end when we managed to let them get 3 goals in a row, leaving us 6-3 down at the end.
This left us in the play off final for 15th or 16th against the other (mostly) Cardiff.
City team “Itchy�. We were comfortably ahead 3-1 when Kate S fell on her ankle awkwardly, there was an audible snapping sound, first aid on and she was obviously not going to be able to continue. We quickly rounded up some replacements for Kate and her human crutches and played the rest of the game ending up 4-1 ahead. Overall we had a good day in the sun playing korfball to some music which always makes it better, check out the photos on Pete’s facebook profile. About ten of us went out to Terra Nova that night with the rest of the sunburnt punters, check out Stuart’s photos on Facebook.
Here’s to a better performance in Croydon.