Monday, September 27, 2010

Things Chimay Will Make You Say

You know something we've realised lately? Reading descriptions of frisbee games really isn't very interesting. In fact, unless you were there and/or you get a mention in the article itself then you'd have to wonder if the few minutes that you might spend reading a game review wouldn't really be better invested in, oh, let's see - making some homemade hollandaise sauce, planning your trip to a farmers' market on the weekend, or just taking out the rubbish.

So this week we're saying nothing about the game against MBB last Thursday night, other than the obvious facts that it happened and Dojo lost.

Okay, we might say that the expected Burwell-to-Neild combo didn't bore us to tears as we'd been afraid it would. In fact early on it was more the Burwell-to-Chadwick connection that was taking some kenshi by surprise (ie whoa Buzz has the disc and some tallish guy is running long WTF!). We might also add that the game was 8-3 at half and finished 15-10, meaning the Dojo at least managed to trade the second half despite some pretty wacky options going to ground in the face of a virtually mistake-free Bug performance.

But that's enough of the tedious details of what was just another brick in the BPL Season 2 2010 wall. What we know from the Google stats (and stats, as we heard today, will confess to anything if you torture them for long enough) is that the readers of this blog care little for quality reportage and in-depth match analysis. Juicy BPL scandal is the key here, and thankfully when there's a controversy on the boil in BPL the Dojo is nearly always involved.

Onto the subject of Chris Cunliffe then. Chris, as many will know, is a bit of a gun frisbee player. Turns out that he's been injured for a while (2 years since his last BPL appearance, apparently), and that he's just managed to get himself fit enough to go for a run on Thursday nights. The thing is though - Chris had signed to play Cobras for the remainder of the season (he's young and is entitled to make mistakes), and he needed to play every remaining BPL round in order to be eligible to play in the finals (for reasons we're not about to elaborate upon here). Sadly for the Cobras, their opposition, those mankini-wearing Slamtowners, couldn't get 7 guys to make the trip from the GC and forfeited the game, leaving Chris in an awkward jam. Oh baby - you know where this is going, don't you...

So of course it's Dojo v Bugs. Which means the team some (hi Mike) consider to be the "villains" of the BPL and always shortest of numbers on the night, was up against the team that also happens to be home to our esteemed LD, who couldn't agree more wholeheartedly with Mike vis-a-vis the Dojo's villain status... Anyway, short story is that Chris has now taken up permanent residence at the Dojo, much to the detriment of the Cobras and much to the annoyance of an LD who has long since tired of these sorts of eligibility quandaries (not to mention Dojo opportunism). But don't get too upset just yet Wetnose - Chris is still a shadow of his former self and probably won't be back to his full vertical leap or maximum speed until the semifinals get underway...

Too much? Let us know in the comments if you'd like more of this sort of Courier-Mail gossip column stuff, or if a return to the strictly sporting style of the majority of our first hundred-and-one posts was more to your liking. Or maybe just videos without any words at all...

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Black Light

Were Dojo wearing black against SFC last week? Maybe, but that's the one thing we forgot to ask Pete Allen when we inquired to see if he wouldn't mind putting together a match report for Dojo's round 5 BPL matchup against the team that some have affectionately taken to calling "Salami Town"...

Thankfully, Pete was able to find some time in his busy schedule (does anyone know what Pete does other than being awesome at frisbee?), and here's his description of how the game went down:

"Thursday's match began in the usual Dojo way with no one knowing who was and wasn’t showing up, and with a last minute phone call from Stephen letting us know he wasn’t coming after he had arrived home and whilst preparing to leave for the game turned the key in his lovely Porsche, only for nothing to happen…I guess that’s what you get with quality Porsche engineering.

With the arrival of our 8 players and a slow and succinct warm up in stark contrast to the drilled and high intensity warm up down the other end we took the field not sure how this would go. Our opponents had turned out in force and had been doing well this season but how would they go without the Mayor. It appeared as we lined up to receive the pull that we would be facing a 2-3-2 (the light breeze did carry that much info to at least my ears) and then it was on.

Dojo worked the disc around frantically with some extremely fast popping and swinging to work the disc up to the other endzone…and then threw it away. SFC then threw a couple of short passes followed by the usual huck, which didn’t complete, and then Dojo repeated their last effort, and threw it away again…and eventually after quite a long first point conceded. This was pretty much the way the first half went, with Jody throwing his dangerous flick for a few points and pretty spectacular layout D’s (pretty much all from SFC), and it was looking tight after Dojo fought back from 6-4 down to take half 8-6.

The second half saw this rather nice little run of points to the Dojo continue to make it a 7 point run, with pretty much 100% offence after some lucky turnovers from Slamtown who had a little bit of a drop fest for a few points allowing Dojo to get out to 11-6. We like to think it was our intense defense…

Around about now we slackened off a bit to allow a few quick points in and start the hearts beating again (Pete starting to feel the power of the dark side of reportage here...). Luckily with time running out, Coops was on the ball and alerted us to the fact that it was after 9pm and after another Slamtown point time was called, with the last point to start with the scores at 11-9 to Dojo. The last point saw Dojo click back in on offence and sink the last pass with a rather unspectacular pass from and almost complete silence with the receiver standing dead still. Quite a quiet end to what was one of the most fun games of BPL I’ve ever enjoyed and the spirit between the two teams was the best I’ve seen in a long long time - thanks SFC."

Ladies and Gentlemen - Pete Allen. There is no substitute.