(Not Quite) Live and Exclusive

Here it is at last - the Grand Final from BPL Season 2 2008 between Messy Bugs and UQ Passion.

Some will already know the outcome of the game, but for the sake of the story here we're going to leave that until the end. So let's set the scene:

A vast crowd had assembled on the sideline of the centrally-located field, set up specially for the occasion with extra space for beer drinking and even a nice little table with cupcakes (courtesy of Beth Rougier, and possibly friends, as far as we're aware). People had come from all over Brisbane to see two teams packed to the rafters with tall timber and disc-slinging sharpshooters fight it out for the title, and here's how it got underway:



UQ seemed nervy, and starting every point on offence gave them little time to set up their defensive strategy of getting Big Jules in Jason's face and having Johnny Mac chase Mike all over the field. On the contrary, Messy were cruising along with quick counters whenever they got the turnover. We pick up the action again with the Messy boys going into a huddle when UQ called a much-needed momentum timeout:



As the game went into halftime things were looking, well, grim for the men in pink (and a bit of white on this occasion). The commentary team kept on drinking though, becoming more & more loquacious as the game wore on. We hit the field to get some comments from a few local legends of the game, and here's what they had to say:



So, a unanimous verdict against UQ making any sort of comeback. But would they? Could they find the intensity that saw them overcome Dojo in the semi? The second half was about to get underway:



Hmmm - not looking good for the Passion boys, but from a Bug perspective the game was going completely to plan. The ever-reliable Jason-to-Mike connections were complemented by smooth flow with everyone on the field involved in every point. Things started getting a bit sloppy toward the end with Messy knowing they had it in the bag and UQ getting more and more desperate to score quickly, and this produced several multi-turnover points of the sort we don't expect to see in a regular BPL game, let alone the Final.

But we'd all come this far with it, so we decided to stick around to the bitter end:



Okay, not quite the bitter end. With all those stoppages and a few gratuitous interviews with members of the audience we found ourselves running out of mini-DVDs with a couple of points still to play... But no matter - the blowout win to Messy was never in doubt and no matter what Dan Young will tell you about UQ finally playing some decent ultimate in the dying moments the whole thing ended pretty anticlimactically. Okay - Wetnose's layout goal for the win was reasonably watchable. Much more so than Will Churchill's outrageously unnecessary (and unsuccessful) airborne bid from earlier in the game...

So there you go. From recollection the final score was something like 18-9, and for us it seemed that the biggest difference between the two teams was consistency on the night. The Messy boys bring the exact same game (not to mention pretty much the exact same roster) to the field every week and they execute their well-known gameplan with the same effectiveness game in, game out. No other team in the league seems able to do this, and it's hard to imagine Messy's reign coming to an end any time soon unless the other teams can match their reliability. If only Mike would update their blog from time to time...

But the best news of all is that BPL Season 3 starts up THIS THURSDAY NIGHT under the iron-fisted leadership of new LD Stu Austin. Early signs indicate that Stu will be running the league strictly on a need-to-know basis with a similarly dictatorial style to his predecessor Jon Good. Coverage here on the DojoMojo Blog will be uninterrupted, of course...