Be the Club...

What do you get when you combine late-night highlights of the Ryder Cup with a nice dram of Macallan? The first post on the Dojo blog in a long time - that's what.

Oh man - so much to write about, so many distractions. Let's take it from the top. DojoMojo has qualified for yet another BPL grand final this season with a gritty 3-point win over Cobras. And that's where the latest round of controversy starts!

Controversy #1 - Reece

We (ie I) let Reece play. Well you know it just wouldn't have felt right getting into the grand final against a 6-man team (and it certainly wouldn't have felt great should we have happened to lose to one!). This despite the fact that our man Chris Cunliffe accepted Stu's ruling and didn't attempt to get on the field. In fact he didn't even attempt to get TO the field, but that's another matter altogether...

Nonetheless we feel sure that had Chris turned up then Liam would have happily allowed him to play in exchange for bringing the Cobras roster up to 7 with Reece.

Okay to be honest we were having some serious second thoughts about the wisdom of our chivalrous conduct about 5 points in, when the Cobras were starting to build a small lead courtesy of some vintage Stewart play, but at the end of the day it does feel good to have won a proper game...

Controversy #2 - Ultimate Fighting or Ultimate Disc?

Sure, the Cobras captain has a bit of a dodgy reputation when it comes to foul calls, and he does like giving receivers a bit of a touch up (putting it mildly?) after making a bid on a long disc. But none of that justified our man Ryan pushing Liam to the ground twice after some borderline post-catch contact. Yes, tempers had been building for a while (especially courtesty of an utterly bogus "out" call by Liam a few points earlier), but any kind of physical retaliation is completely unacceptable in Ultimate. A Spirit timeout was called and Ryan made a full apology to an accepting Liam, but in the interests of setting a suitably harsh benchmark DojoMojo has officially suspended Mr Black until next season, ruling him out for this week's Grand Final match against UQ. Ouch.

So we've got no Ryan, no Cunliffe, left-handed Leon only has his right hand, Eastburn has been injured all season and Dan Walls decided that the second half of 2010 would be a good time to take a sabbatical. If we can win the big game from here it'll be a miracle.

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...

The Scottish Play

Our worst fears were realised on Field 3 of the Annerley Junior Football fields last Thursday night.

Sooner or later, we knew that all this video coverage would lead to trouble. You know what we mean - amongst us there are always going to be some with that certain disposition, that little weakness. They see the reaction that one little layout can cause and they can't help themselves. They yearn for a taste of that adulation, that feeling of heroism, that sense that they may be high-fived at random in the street by someone who happened to witness the feat.

The game started out sensibly enough, and DojoMojo quickly moved out to a comfortable lead with a combination of good choices on offence and strong commitment on defence. Here's how the first half went down:



But with a chunky lead in the bag, those suffering from Macbeth-style personality flaws saw their chance - especially when our fab filmographer Marijke Walls decided to try a new camera angle from the back of the endzone... The free-for-all that ensued was thankfully only brief, and to extend our Shakespearian analogy (this one's for you, Roger Church) Birnam Wood was kept well away from Dunsinane Hill, but it was long enough for Andy Lankowski to make his fateful bid at fame and fortune. It's buried in the middle of this second half footage, but we've repeated Andy's moment of near-but-so-far-from-glory a few times to make sure it can't be missed. Here we go:



So that's it. With that lengthy gag at Andy's expense we've pretty much neglected to mention that the game was a fairly straightforward success for the Dojo, especially once we got the message that Chris Cunliffe was going to pull down pretty much anything thrown long unless it was deadly accurate. But Chris and the Passion boys really missed the services of John McNaughton and just didn't have the throwing depth to keep pace with the Dojo on this occasion. They certainly made up for that with their high-spirited and unrelenting workrate, spurred on by Mr Armpits himself, Piers Truter.

Anyway, that's it for another round of BPL. Two rounds to go until the finals, with Dojo set to play Messy Bugs and Rawhide in the remaining regular season matches. Previous form this season is a 15-10 win over Messy (or a Dojo forfeit if you believe LD Stu), and Rawhide failed to field a team. Plenty of motivation there for cracking Ultimate all round then...

And as usual, the A&B poll is ready for voting. Ryan, Stefan and Mike, the guys who seem to have access to the most computers, all took sickies this week so we should see a rare round of voting that is entirely reflective of on-field play...