Mixed Tour 2 Report

Posted by Jono on 17th Apr 2011 in Blog, Mixed, Tournaments | 0 comments

Report from Mike:

Last weekend saw Tom, Jamie, Mike, Dobby, Alec, Chris, Martin, Rhys, Ellie, Jen, Hannah, Kemi and Vicki make the long trip to Cardiff to go and chase some more plastic!

We started at 9am against top seeds in our pool, Shakedown (aka Shake & Bake). With six changes from MT1 we hadn’t played together before this so we tried 5/2, 3/4, zone and man. We put up a lot of long shots, about 95% of which we brought down, although shame they weren’t a little longer as we failed to put final enzone passes together. We lost 9-4, but a good enjoyable start to the day.

Next we played against Steal 2, who we were determined to beat due to the TNT rivalry between our teams. They had good handlers but our zone stopped them from capitalising on this, particularly with Dobby’s speedy chase. And despite having to replay a point as we didn’t realise they were playing 4 girls, we beat them 10-3.

Lemmings 2 was our next match, and we wanted to win this one due to the sudden death game last tour. Our zone was almost impenetrable, with point blocks from Mike, run through D’s from Martin and Vicki and even a huge jumping Callahan from Ellie. Tom was consistently putting up long shots and Jamie finished the game in style throwing a great hammer to Rhys. 11-3 win hitting hard cap.

Our next game was against Choke Hazard, again who we’d played at MT1 where they had won fairly comfortably. This time we made it considerably more difficult for them with some pin-point hucks from Jamie and Chris’s cutting creating the fluidity and continuation that Tom had been teaching us all day. Kemi played almost every point and still managed to handle brilliantly and bring down some difficult discs. Vicki and Hannah also made quite a partnership, passing up the line to each other gaining valuable yards. Mike finally started proving his speed with some long cuts and Rhys was invaluable on D with blocks in the endzone on the break side. Again this was a great game for Flyght but unfortunately we couldn’t take the last couple points so we lost 6-4 ending the first day of games.

We went for a meal in town and then hit the party. Tom decided he was going to make a night of it a took his lucozade bottle full of Smirnoff ice – classy! Turned out the party was more a quiet chat in the pub but was some great team bonding discussing James Bond and flipping beer mats (which Rhys is surprisingly good at!).

On Sunday we started at 10:30 against oatcakes. This was a difficult game and a little embarrassing as they were owning us with our own zone! We also realised that everything was going through Bollard so with a tactical time-out we decided to play zone but with a man mark on Bollard. This tactic seemed to work at first and with Martin, Rhys and Jamie handling brilliantly through their zone, it was only due to a few unlucky drops in the endzone that our score wasn’t higher. Tom managed to get a block on a huck which meant that he had to go off injured, but he then came on the next point and did exactly the same thing again! As he said “Pain is temporary. Glory is forever”, but judging by the amount of pain he was in, forever is not long enough for the glory to be worth it! We lost this 13-2 which is a fair result although a couple more points on our side would have reflected the game more accurately.

This loss meant that we were then to play Meat Pie. We knew that they had far more experience and skill than us but we had a bigger team and more energy so our plan for this game was to run them ragged! This didn’t pay off at the beginning as they took the half 7-3. After the break we scored three on the trot which brought us back in the game. Everyone was fired for this match and it began to feel like our final. Although our throws were sometimes lacking, our catching more than made up for it. Alec, Mike and Jamie managed to bring down a lot of swill (including one that Jamie kicked up into his hands for the score). There was a small incident where Mike had an argument with one of their players after being denied a pancake score, but once this had been resolved we continued to play losing the point. This fired us up more and we managed to get to 10-10, game to 12. Luckily we didn’t lose our heads and some great deep cuts from Martin won us the game 12-11. Get in!

We still had one more game against Yopen before we could finish, but after the dramatic game against meat pie we were all exhausted. We began by trading points but they kept playing 4 girls which we just couldn’t keep up with. This meant that Ellie’s injured knee from MT1 finally gave out and the other girls were iron-womaning! Nonetheless Hannah was constantly getting free with some great cutting and Vicki proved that she can catch anything with some layout grabs. Jen was somehow STILL had enough energy to continuously cut deep whilst Kemi and Rhys managed to play some awesome home-boy. Martin again showed us what a great deep player he is. Our D was pretty slick with Dobby running just as fast as a disc on chase and Alec getting point blocks. Unfortunately we just didn’t have the legs so they won the game comfortably.

Special Mentions:
- Kemi being a machine and playing millions of points and still handling and cutting consistently well
- Vicki’s great back-up, catching our missed throws and getting two hands to every disc

Was a really fun tournament,

See most of you at MT3

Mike

Photo © 2011 – Andrew Moss