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...

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...

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.

One Hundred Not Out

On June 12th 2008 the DojoMojo blog took its first tentative step into the Ultimate blogosphere. In that first post we described ourselves as "the oldest, most gloriously history-laden and also most spectacularly well-merchandised team around", and nothing much has changed. Except for the fact that, including this one, 100 posts have taken up their own tiny chunks of server space somewhere out there in the great Google cloud...

Over the past 26 months we've interviewed the biggest names in the BPL, had our team shirt voted one of the best in the world (thanks everyone), written plenty of controversial stuff (none of which we regret in any way), and of course provided video coverage of a multitude of BPL games and two Grand Finals (the ones we weren't playing in) absolutely free of charge.

For those with a statistical bent, or even just the slightest degree of curiosity, or perhaps just wanting to dodge work for a few minutes, here's a few interesting DojoMojo Blog facts:

6,849 unique visitors
29.96% new visits

#1 most viewed post: Sorry Mum (251 visits)
#2 most viewed post: Smells Like Bad Spirit (153 visits)
#3 most viewed post: Worst Huck Ever (147 visits)

Seems nothing rates quite as high as a good old Spirit controversy, eh?!

Visitors have viewed the blog from 43 different countries (including the odd visit from interesting-sounding places like Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania and Laos, among many others).

Top Ten Visiting Nations:

#1 Australia - 6,031 visitors
#2 USA - 341 visitors
#3 Canada - 133 visitors
#4 UK - 59 visitors
#5 Germany - 26 visitors
#6 Hong Kong - 20 visitors
#7 Ireland - 13 visitors
#8 New Zealand - 12 visitors
#9 Brazil - 12 visitors
#10 Japan - 10 visitors

Sure, we're not likely to be targeted by News Ltd for a hostile takeover anytime soon, but it's good to know that people around the world are getting to read - and watch! - the way Ultimate is played here in Brisbane. Hope you're liking what you see.

Pete Allen Goes Above & Beyond

It's official, and deserving of a blog post all to itself:

Pete Allen is the winner of DojoMojo's Above&Beyond competition for Season 1 2010. Well done and well deserved, Pete. Your fantastic prize is in the post (oh so unreliable these days...) and your name has been added to the glittering list of Dojo legends on the Above&Beyond Honour Board....

Bear Market Blogging

Seems that most of the BPL blogging community is in hibernation this week (we really hang out for those Power Rankings, Spaz), with the one notable exception of the ever-friendly & lighthearted Heroes media outlet. Okay, so maybe no-one but the Heroes themselves cares that their training has been re-scheduled, and perhaps that's something that might be better communicated via team email rather than worldwide blog post, but nonetheless Carl did manage to put in a trailblazing BPL blogging effort a few posts back... He even had time to grumble about the crumble of the BPL fields - couldn't agree more, Carl.

Hmmm... You know how when you read a Jeremy Clarkson article in the paper he spends at least the first 500 words rambling on about something totally unrelated to the subject of his review? Well we'd been hoping to adopt a similar approach with this post, picking up on shreds of gossip and innuendo from the many other BPL press agencies out there and building some sort of LD-annoying controversy out of it. But reading back over what we've written it appears that we've accidentally succeeded in building a reasonable word count out of very little material, and wouldn't be the least bit surprised if most readers have already clicked away to some of the much more interesting content the internet has to offer... Hi Lee.

Oh okay, let's talk briefly about the game against Heroes last Thursday night. Yes, Sensei C appeared to be in dire need of some laser eye surgery, flailing around for a spinning white blur on several occasions. Too much time staring at the "New Post" screen on the Dojo blog perhaps??? Otherwise it was pretty much the usual situation against Heroes - Dojo turn up expecting an easy win (thankfully with a team this week), then spend the first half doing some lazy trading, lurch into halftime with a dodgy 8-6 (or was it 8-7?) lead and finally decide that games against Heroes need to be won in exactly the same way as against any other BPL team i.e. significant effort and commitment required. So with socks pulled up and appropriate exertion applied the kenshi roll through the second half to a 15-8 win.

Heroes have some useful-looking new recruits this season, and with Matt Boevink now in an on-field Captain-Coach role, they should see some significant improvement in depth of ability and availability of multiple options. However having said that, every second pass is still going to Jangles, and relying on a key player like that is never good for any team. Just look what happened to the Bugs without Mike last season...

Sorry couldn't resist. But hey, if you're going to be so tactless as to advertise yourselves as "Brisbane's current Premier Ultimate Frisbee Team" (which might need a re-write to bring it up to date BTW) you really are asking for trouble...

The Above&Beyond poll is updated above right for a fresh round of voting....