Final World Championships results for Australia

Well the fields are still open for four more games but the dust has settled on the Australian campaign at Worlds. The results are in, with some pleasant surprises and a few unfortunate outcomes. Of course, all in all, a great effort from all the teams and it sounds like they played spirited and strongly across the board. I have been following the results from the distance of the interwubs, including the score reporter, webcasts and blogs of those that are there.

The highlight of the campaign has to be the outstanding performance of the Junior Girls, Terra Australis, coming in second after the Japanese. Their pool results were a mix of strong wins and tough losses. They were only beaten by the Japanese (That look set to take out the overall points score) and the Colombian team. They faced up against the Colombian girls team in the semi final in what must have been a daunting mental situation. This was a team that had already beat them twice in this tournament. However, each time the Terra girls got closer and closer to the Colombians and in the semi they managed to build on the lessons learnt from the previous games and bested the Colombians to earn themselves a spot in the final. It also seems that Terra is in line to take out the Spirit competition, contributing to a really strong double medal performance that should be the inspiration of any ultimate team. I can't wait to sit down with Fatty and some of the key players on the team and get a feel for the methods of success the team employed. (Aside from Ellie/Cath throwing it to Ellie/Crystal)

While the girls certainly achieved beyond expectation, unfortunately some of the other teams just did not. The Thunder boys team had some great results, including beating Canada and Great Britain at least once each but once again were bitterly beaten in their last game. The Taipans, our Masters team, also had a great start, cleaning up Japan and GB on the first day and stream rolled through the middle of the tournament but came unstuck at the end of the tournament, losing their last two games to take 4th place. Finally the Dingoes had a shocking loss to the British Mens team in the quarter finals. Report indicate that the Brits were firing and the Australian team lost grip of the game after the second half, as the 'all-star' line was called on to stem the flow of turn-overs and opposition goals. After a tough loss, the team did rally and won their last two games, to come in 5th in the Open division. All three teams looked reasonably strong in the early or middle of the tournament but just had a bad run in the final days. Again, I'm keen to hear all about the insider perspective from these teams and those that watched their game.

The other good news stories are the improvement in results for the Womens and Mixed teams.  Both teams had good wins through the tournament, struggled with injuries and improved their results from last Worlds by one place, to 4th. Hopefully future teams will be able to build on the success of their campaigns this time round and come home with some bling.

In other Australian International sporting news, I watched some of the first soccer games at the Olympic games yesterday. Australia Vs Serbia was the first match in the double header and unfortunately it was a sloppy affair, particularly in the first half. Lack of touch on the ball, lazy long ball options, teamwork miscues and slow pace soccer was the order of the day. Obviously the heat was taking its toll on the players. The second half was better and the Australian's scored first, off a short cross into the goal box, which about 4 players from both sides had a bid at and missed. I think it was number 13 that slammed the ball in the net after its long and tense (.3 of a second) journey across the Serbian goal face. While our last quarter defence was quite strong, we alloed too many chances at goal, conceding 14 corners and 14 shots on goal. They were destined to break though eventually. The Serbian's answered not long after our own goal, mid way through the second half, with a great cross and header. The final score was one all.

In contrast, the second game of the Argies Vs Ivory Coast was a festival of amazing football. Fantastic touch, pace and control from both teams offenses made for an absolute joy of an experience.  The Ivory Coast "scored' first but had the goal denied by the linesman. On the replay shown at the stadium, I thought it was clearly not off side and that the Ivory Coast boys were robbed. The first half ended nil all after a sweet bunch of football. The Ivory boys managed to punch the ball into the net first in the 2nd half, with a long cross from the right wing, finished by a high header which didn't give the goalie a chance to save. Messi, a highlight of the whole experience for 70% of the stadium, answered soon after, running down a sharp mid-range pass and besting the keeper one on one. Messi was also the architect of the game winning goal, after a sneaky quick play-on from a foul committed just outside the penalty box deep on the left flank of the Ivory Coast half. He slipped into the box and shot at a oblique angle, with the deflection being put away by a team mate whose name escapes me. Final result 2-1, great football.

Ok, food time!

More worlds stuff

Hi again,

OK, so in response to popular demand (that is, a few people at the Dev Clinic last night) I've got more details on worlds stuff AND added a neat new labels bar on the side. Go ahead, try it out - you won't be disappointed (well actually you might, since there's nothing particularly new or exciting about the posts to which those labels refer).

Anyway, the World Ultimate and Guts Championships website www.wugc2008.com not only has a bunch of useless information for players, it also has nifty stuff for spectators too, follow the "scheduals" link to see when games will be played, live updates of scores (which is exciting, but all the action happens in the wee hours of the morning) and details about the standings in each division and individual player's goals and assists. I see that local heart-throb Max Wheeler not only looks good, but also has a whopping 8 assists (that's throwing a goal for the uninitiated). Go Max.

The other place to keep an eye on in the UltiVillage website. UltiVillage have been around for a few years now filming frisbee stuff. Their footage is usually OK, but it is sometimes a little close to the action for nerds like me. Anyway, they've got some clips up and apparently they'll be LIVE STREAMING the finals or something equally technological. I am not up to speed with any of this because I have dial-up. Yes, dear readers, I am one of those people who contribute to Australia's embarrassing broadband uptake statistics. Blame TransACT, and Pookie, who have combined to bring about this sorry state of affairs. Anyway, have a look at http://www.ultivillage.com/ for more details and don't even think about telling me all about the latest clip of Jonno Holmes leaping 92 feet in the air and catching the disc with his nostrils and throwing 6 thumb hammers for goals all on different fields before he even reaches the ground only to have them all called back for travels because he hasn't established a pivot foot which he doesn't need to do anyway.

Also, for those Dev Clinic faithfuls who want to see that Wide World of Sports footage it's up on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5A8tj7F5hc. Since some of the authors here are in that footage we set our internet connection aside for a whole day to watch it. Twatson is the dude in orange who headspikes the disc. A Plus!

Worlds! Soon! Exciting!

The World Ultimate and Guts Championships starts in Vancouver tomorrow! The aussie teams at this tournament are pretty much the pinnacle of Australian Ultimate and are pretty competitive on the world stage. Last Worlds (in 2004) the Dingos (our open division team) picked up bronze with the other teams coming in around 5th and 6th. The teams have already done a quick tour of a bunch of strong west-coast frisbee towns in the states and have made waves with a number of impressive wins against quality opponents (I think the Dingos got on the news, which is pretty neat). For some of our teams this represents the first chance they've had to play against teams in their own division (the Firetails, our women's team played their first female opponents on foreign soil - just one of the difficulties aussie rep teams face).

You can keep an eye on the proceedings at the team's blog sites,

The Dingos (Open): http://dingos.blogspot.com/
The Firetails (Women's): http://firetails.blogspot.com/
The Barramundis (Mixed): http://barramundis2008.blogspot.com/
The Taipans (Masters): Well, it seems the masters' website is as old as their roster. Hopefully they'll just whack updates on www.AFDA.com.

There seem to be some decent regular updates on the progress of the open and women's juniors teams at www.afda.com

General tournament information with draws and results and stuff will be on www.wugc2008.com and there will no doubt be write ups of most of the interesting stuff on the AFDA website.

I'll be keeping an eye on the goings on. Good luck to all the competitors, especially the Canberra crew of Jonno, Keah, Max, Adam, Helen, Leon, DJ, Lucy, Charli, Laina and Vicki.

Plan B wins Halibut

Several lovely Canberra players were involved in the multi-state team that won Halibut just last weekend. This team was called Plan B and was the brain child of Erin Wallis and myself. The ACT players were James 'Jesus' Ley, Thomas 'Chumpy' Walcott, Sarah Jones (who is now moving overseas) and myself. We played with Erin, Alec, Ali (formerly) and Allison from SA; Alex Ong, Jo Creswell and Luke Stephens from Victoria; and some chump called Jmac from Brisbane. Good times

The tournament was its usual good self. Good fields, food and people. The party did seem to suffer from terrible music selection. Apparently the DJ had been involved in a car accident and thus the manager was in control. The outcome was a big turnout early in the night but rapid losses from the party as halibutters attempted to find a better groove.

The most challenging game was (unsurprisingly) the final. Mind the Gap shifted off to an early lead, going two nil up. Plan B settled and the first half saw the team slowly gain control of the lead, taking half at 8-6. In general, there were very few turn-overs from both teams, with the wiley cuts and undefendable throws of Mind the Gap matching the quick moving, high work rate offence of Plan B.

Half-time looked tense over in the Mind the Gap camp but the Plan B players had other things to worry about....just what exactly was going to be our last dance move? Every half over the entire tournament, we added another sequence to our dance. This was to be our last effort, so we settled on the addition of our team cheer "Plan B - Good enough for me" to close out the dance. Our last performance of the dance was met with wild acclaim and cheers (jeers?) from the crowd and once finished, we were ready again to play.

The second half saw Plan B tightening their defensive efforts and further lock the game down. Mind the Gap rallied briefly at around 14-8 to take the game to 14-10 but Plan B settled to take the game 15-10. Working the way up the field against a 2-3-2 zone defence, Plan B swung the disc wide and punished the defence with several backhands into the middle of the field from the right-hand side. This throw was to be the game-winner, with a wide swing and some gaps upfield giving me a clean backhand shot into the middle of the endzone where Tom 'Chumpy' Walcott, our 6'7'' receiver, had gone into stealth mode and was unmarked. Victory again, my third tournament win for the year.

I was really happy with how I played over the weekend. In the final I had a strong game, with 5 assists and two blocks. I really enjoyed playing as a O/D handler and I am really giving serious thought to giving up on cutting (which really screws the skin on my feet) and working on my core-strengthen handling ability. We will have to see about that....

The highlight of the tournament was seeing a multi-state team come together so strongly on and off the field. At the end of the tournament, our offence was exceptionally clean for a team that had not played together before. The crazy random way our half-time and timeout dance had come together was also a crazy organic happening that was enjoyed by the whole team aside from Chumpy, who is far too cool for us.

There are plans afoot that will see the return of Plan B at another time but it seems likely that I will be going with Plan A for next years Halibut, the ACT mixed club. I look forward to defending the title next year with a different batch of trouble-makers.

Updates from the wider frisbee world

Its finals night on Wednesday night in Canberra. If you are a Div 1 player, come early and check out the goods in Div 2 and if you play only Divs 2 & 3 then stay on a bit later to see the top tier of local competition, the Div 1 final, from 8:30pm.

The ACT Ultimate Association had a quick meeting last night and I will leave it to Bags to put up the minutes of the meetings to inform you all of the exact goings on. We managed to get the masses out of the house of twits by 9pm to watch one of the better episodes of Drawn Together, which on the best of nights is quite rank. Too bad about missing South Park....

'Worlds' training has been organised by Jonno Holmes and booked by John 'Bags' Horan for Tuesday nights, so anyone that wants a decent quality hit-out should get in touch with Jonno 'Darling' Holmes and confirm with him the timings and location.

A few months ago the AFDA (Australian Flying Disc Association) board began a consultation process to see if changing the timings of nationals and mixed nationals could be swapped to improve recruitment and expansion of ultimate in Australia. ACTUA, not meeting for the past 6 months, never got around to submitting an official stance on this. We discussed the matter last night at the meeting and Bags made a strong case to have mixed nats and single sex nats swapped and the rest of the commitee agreed that it would improve the lower and middle-tier of ultimate and in the long-term the elite level at the sacrifice at making it a little more uncomfortable to train for nationals for the men's and women's teams. We decided that ACTUA would prefer the switch and intended to indicate as such, despite it being many months past the date for submissions to AFDA. Of course, the day after we finally decided what we wanted, the results of the consultation process came out, thus making our chat last night moot. The AFDA board has gone with the safer, more conservative option of sticking to the current schedule. There are many pros and cons to the change and the decision is quite a tricky one but there is at least one point I will contest: To all those softies that do not want to train for nationals in the winter, I say phooey to you, move to Canberra and harden up.

The National Ultimate Frisbee League (NUFL as it is known) is on again this weekend. There are several Canberra players going along and playing with the 'Country' team, which has players from Canberra, Wollongong and Newcastle. This team has many of the players from the past triad team, Deathstar and this team seems to suffer from similar mysterious difficulties on the field. Hopefully the team can gel better for this weekend. There will also be a game between the Australian's mens team and 'rest of the Australia' pick up team, which should be a spirited battle. Hopefully I will have reports on the whole weekend ready by wednesday of next week.

Thats all for now

Barramundis Found Unusually Far South

Last weekend, top ultimate players from around Australia put their cleats in their hand luggage and flew to training camps for our national representative teams. The vast green fields of Deakin took a break from Touch Football to host the Barramundis, Australia's national mixed ultimate team, as they prepare for the World Ultimate and Guts Championships in Vancouver in August of this year. These training weekends provide a chance for our top teams to build team structures and tactics and give players a chance to learn everyone else's names. This can be made difficult by the size of the teams (national teams often have 20 players or more) and the complexity of people's names (Peter Blakely, for example, is called "Tex". Why? Brett Middleton = "Sweet As". Again, why? Al Don's name only has five letters, so while his name is easy to learn, he often struggles to remember others').

After a whole day spent learning names and dietary requirements (Al Don, for example, won't eat anything with more than five letters in its name), the Barramundis matched up against some local punching bags for a chance to try their structures against some unsuspecting opponents. The ACT pick-ups, affectionately called "Team Crush" played a fluid unstructured style which worked well against the Mundis' zone but faltered against man, and the Mundi's offense (especially late in the game) moved the disc faster than Crush were willing to run. After a close first half, the Mundis ran away in the second half to win 17-10. Canberran Mundis Max Wheeler, Adam Mortimer, Vickie Saye, Lucy Stevenson and Laina Hall clearly lamented missing the chance to play for a strong local pickup team, but will no doubt take solace in their role in helping their team to victory and in the opportunity they have to represent Australia later this year. Huy Vu from Adelaide will also be drawing solace from that fact after confidently asserting that local defensive mongoose Asher Gentle "totally can't get near" Peter "Tex" Blakely just moments AFTER Asher got a run-through layout block on the Fakulti receiver. Whoops! Asher's block was just one of a number of memorable moments among Vickie Saye's layout for a contested goal, Lucy Stevenson's forehand huck to score and several as yet unconfirmed sightings of Australia's most technologically advanced clipboard.

Congratulations also to Leon Smith and Damien Jaccoud (who are playing with the Taipans in the Master's Division), Keah Molomby and Helen Osmond (who play for the Firetails in the Women's Division) and Jonothan Holmes (who plays for the Dingo's in the Open Division) for being selected for Australia's highest honour (no, it's not the Australian of the Year). We at the CUB secret underground facility wish all our reps on the nationals teams all the best in their preparation for Worlds.