Dojo Wins BPL Final

Those brilliantly clever Germans at Porsche know they're onto a good thing. They've known it since it came off the drawing board of the late, great Ferdinand "Butzi" Porsche in 1963 and they've been living the dream ever since. 

And what is this good thing that they're onto? Well, it's the 911, of course. Not only is it the greatest sports car ever made (and everything Clarkson says against it just reinforces this fact), it is also the most enduring, least modified motor vehicle design of all time! Thanks to Butzi and co., the design department at Porsche AG has been able to put its feet up for almost 50 years, doing nothing other than tweaking the odd headlight detail or adding some cupholders as an excuse to launch a "new" model.

(NB we will also accept the converse theory that when the Porsche design department actually does attempt to create something new, like the monstrous Cayenne 4WD or ghastly Panamera they tend to get things horribly wrong, but that's getting too far off-topic...).

Anyway, how does this have anything at all to do with frisbee blogging? Well obviously everyone knows that we here at the Dojo are big Porsche fans. But despite that it's taken us 105 blog posts to realise how applicable the Porsche philosophy is to the humble act of writing about the exploits of Brisbane's current Premier Ultimate Frisbee team (sorry Bugs - it's well past time to change your tagline :-)). So from now on we're running with every post being called "Dojo Wins BPL Final", which for the statistically inclined, and assuming that we only use this title when it reflects actual events, means that on current form you can expect a new post at the end of 3 out of every 4 seasons...

So here we are - Dojo wins BPL Final! Yay us. We won't bore you with any tedious, blow-by-blow descriptions of the game. Suffice to say it was a properly competitive encounter between the two form teams of the season, starting out with a bunch of nervous turnovers from both teams, followed by some outrageous hail-mary hucks from Al Don to Gref (or basically anyone in the vicinity of the Dojo endzone). But from 4-1 down the Dojo turned on the mistake-free offence and committed defence to score 14 of the next 17 points and walk away with the Dog Cup. Which is now covered in rust thanks to it having spent a season by the beach...

Highlights included a massive layout from Al Don to hold onto a huck from Gref and score Slamtown's last goal of the night, MVP Dan Walls owning the air all over the park (with a bit of help from Pete Allen...), and Leon McIntyre failing to hold onto a block in the endzone which would have given him the title as the first player ever to score the winning BPL grand final goal with a Callahan. Oh well.

Hang on - we nearly forgot THE highlight of the night, which was a thank-god-it's-on-video layout score from our very own Adam Baker, also known as the BPL League Director. Awesome effort all round Adz. And BTW thanks for the sensational Mountain Designs jacket "Winning Captain" prize. Love it.

Yep with sweet prizes and seamless management, the BPL just keeps getting better and better. Hopefully it'll also keep getting bigger and bigger - if you're out there somewhere reading this (still!) and thinking of giving BPL a go then don't think about it any longer - get on down for the all-comers winter league (check out the Brisbane Premier League blog for more info) and try it out for yourself.

Now - how long will we have to wait to see the full video coverage appear at Gold Coast Ultimate???

Dojo wins BPL Final

Of all the big issues surrounding BPL ultimate over the past 6 months or so, the biggest of them all has been the constant question: why has the DojoMojo blog been silent for so long? The speculation and rumours have ranged from the scandalous to the downright outrageous, with some even going so far as to suggest that this blogger's prolonged absence may have been due to a broken "w" key, due to excessive W+M1 misadventures... Utter libel - just look at the veritable avalanche of w's already used in this post!

But now, at last, and using a spare keyboard plugged in for whenever we need to use a "w" (which is surprisingly often - we've used 6 already in just this sentence alone!), we can at last give you the true reason for the 6 months' worth of static that have filled the screen of Dojo TV. In an ambitious screen production rivalling the supreme efforts of the great Jack Horner, we have stopped at nothing and spared no expense to produce a moving, narrative-laden documentary film covering the titanic clash between the heavily-favoured (and sadly now-defunct) UQ Lovers and the walking-wounded underdog DojoMojo in the BPL season 2 2010 grand final.

So here it is, the official, Dave Watson-directed, Palme d'Or winning film ("short obscure-sports drama" category) that so many avid BPL fans have been waiting so long to see:






There you go. Could history repeat this Thursday night? Can the rank outsider Dojo team, further hampered by an ominous Minor Premiership, pull off a grandstand win against the unbackable favourites and perennial Power Rankings supremos, the Slamtown Flatball Club? Only one thing is certain - you'll have to wait a long time to see the video...

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.

Fifty-Four Million Words and Counting

Sun Tzu once said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep. Okay, maybe it wasn't Sun Tzu, but the point we're trying to make is that with the near thirty minutes of video coverage below running at one thousand words per image, this little introductory paragraph is only the first tentative footstep on an Ultimate odyssey that is about to take us all the way to the Gold Coast and back, taking time to paint large portions of Slamtown red, white and black while we're there... Here goes (credit to Ms Becky Larkin for the top shelf cinematography):







Yep - the Flatballers were down 8-3 at halftime, and Dojo managed to stretch the lead out via many, many hammers to 15-8 by the time it was all over. What the video perhaps doesn't convey is that this game was played with exemplary spirit by both teams. Some early niggle was quickly defused by a few well-timed words, and what followed was a hard-fought AND thoroughly enjoyable and respectful game. Otherwise the video pretty much says it all, so to add anything further here would seem superfluous. Oh, other than to mention that Dojo spanking SFC has apparently not been enough to put us back at the top of the Power Rankings (which we love reading - thanks Spaz), despite Passion's pretty ordinary showing against Heroes. Hmmm...

Next week it's Dojo v MBB - sure to be a cracking game, made even moreso by the word on the street being that Bug numero uno won't be around for our game(s?) later in the season. No doubt the already frail autofocus of our video camera will be strained to the limit by a match-up that's usually played out from endzone to endzone, skipping all those boring bits in between... Stay tuned.

Above&Beyond voting is ready and waiting to the right - it's going to be fast & furious with only a few days left before the next round.

Oh and PS Reece - please rest assured that we featured the best moments we had on video from each team in last week's footage. The missing disc eventually turned up, but not in time to make it on the blog (and there was no sign of a callahan - you must've dreamt that one). What we've found though is that the best way to see all the highlights we want to see is to produce our own video...