Unfortunately today the weather put a dampener on the whole tournament. The tournament directors were forced to cancel one slot of games as torrential rain and gale force winds have left several pitches unplayable. My heart goes out to Dom, Louis and the rest of the volunteers who must have endured an awfully stressful day, as they tried to find a solution. Credit to them, they’ve implemented Plan B, found new pitches and shortened tomorrow’s games to 80 minutes and to 15. I hope for their sake and for ours, the weather proves more agreeable tomorrow.
It’s a pity because during Monday and Tuesday I overheard numerous members of the public asking about the sport, phoning people to tell them what was going on and being eager to support the Irish, as the tournament gathered a huge level of outside interest. That was thanks to two things, great weather and good quality ultimate. Sadly we had neither today as mother nature ruined every game as a spectacle.
We played Japan at 9am. There was a heightened sense of tension around the game as five of our players were awaiting Leaving Cert results later in the day. I have to give huge credit to Caroline, Kate O’Regan, Jess MacSweeney, Mags and Niamh who have shown an enormous amount of maturity to balance study and ultimate commitments over the past few months as well as dealing with the ordeal of being in the strangest of environments when receiving their results. Well done girls. We’re all really proud of you!
With the wind as it was we knew this game was going to be decided by upwind points. We employed similar strategy to that which we used against Colombia, playing a zone and trying to choose our lines carefully so that we had strong up wind throwers on when playing against the wind and reliable heads to ensure we scored our down wind points.
For the first two points all went to plan. Japan scored their down wind and we responded by scoring a Callaghan (a Callaghan is a name used to describe a point when a player unintentionally throws the disc to an opponent in the endzone. Similar to an own goal). Caitlin was the beneficiary as the Japanese struggled to get the disc off their end zone line as they threw up wind.
Unfortunately they had no such trouble on their second attempt as they scored an upwind to make it 3-1. A bit of naivety on our part as we looked for too many passes near our own brick mark before punting it deep. 3-1 became 4-1 as Japan converted their down wind and we found ourselves behind early again.
We continued to trade points, with everything being scored down wind. Caitlin assisted to Doireann before scoring her second Callaghan of the game, quite an achievement by anyone’s standards! Leanne assisted to JD and Caroline to leave the score 8-5 at half. We scored our opening down wind; Leanne to JD but we went on to conceded three in a row as Japan managed to work in another up wind score.
We didn’t go down without a fight scoring again, Leanne to Caitlin, before Japan finished it off to leave us with a final score of Japan 12-7 Ireland. We didn’t get MVP, MSP and A-Game votes, as we were too preoccupied with sheltering from the rain after the game. We’ll have them for you in tomorrow’s blog.
Baring in mind that Japan are world champions at senior women’s level, I think 12-7 is a score line that not many people would have expected. It’s unfortunate that the game wasn’t as visually appealing as others we’ve played this week and that a bit of inexperience on our part may have cost us. But there’s undoubtedly lessons to be learned from that game. Hopefully we can take them on board as it looks likely that we’ll have a rematch against Japan tomorrow.
For us Thursday and Friday now essentially become two mini tournaments in themselves. Three teams have progressed to the last six having topped their groups; Colombia, Canada and USA. The crossover games (between the 2nd and 3rd place finishers in each group), were scheduled to take place today but will now be played tomorrow morning. From my understanding those games are Germany v Israel, Italy v Japan & Australia v Sweden. The winners will progress to the top 6. The losers will become the top seeds in three new placement pools.
Those pools will be as follows:
Pool F: Germany or Israel, Latvia & Russia
Pool G: Italy or Japan, Great Britain & Ireland
Pool H: Australia or Sweden, Finland & France
Everyone will play the other two teams in their pool, at the end of which all of the 3rd placed teams will go into a new pool for Friday to contest 15th-13th. All of the 2nd placed teams will contest 12th-10th and all of the winners will contest 7th-9th. I hope that’s correct and easy to understand.
Tomorrow we play GB at 9am and the loser of Japan v Italy at 12.30, both at the DCU sports grounds. There’s nothing like Ireland v GB to draw a crowd so hopefully people will get up early and come out to support us. We know we have to treat these next two days as new tournaments. Hopefully we can get the win tomorrow which would almost guarantee we keep our seeding (12th).
Time for bed. Hopefully 6 hours of sleep and no talking will do my vocal chords a bit of good.
Hobs
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