There are a few things about the location that make or break a canoe polo tournament. These are my top 3:
3. Pitches
The pitches at Taf Bargoed were good, the lines didn't move or drift and the current was weak or non-existent. The goals were ok; personally I prefer the goals made from round bars as the bounce off of the square bars can sometimes go anywhere, but this was good enough. The only small let down was the ability of the refs to watch the game, as on some of the pitches both had to ref from the same side. Another positive was that there were a lot of tents to hide from the rain in!
2. Second Hand Boats
A lot of people try and offer you their own advice when you're looking to buy a new boat, and the main piece of advice you get is to try out as many boats as you can before you buy something... but it seems the best way to make you forget all of this advice is to stick a for sale sign on a second hand boat and bring it along to a comp, as if it's under £200 any chump will buy it. There were loads of boats on offer; one tiny lady tried to sell me some boat with a weight limit of 65Kgs, and it took a lot to convince myself not to buy it as it had a nice hand made for sale sign on it. Rob ended up walking away with a £180 Combat boat, not a bad deal as it only needs a few patches :-/
1. Food
The number 1 thing that makes a canoe polo tournament is the food. Each year I travel up to Doncaster for the uni tournament BUCS (BUSA still to most) and each year I am staggered at the prices they seem to get away with charging for food, especially as it is a uni comp and most students don't want to pay £4 for a bloody burger! Fair play then to Aberfan who seem to always provide a decent enough service for a good price. 50p for a tea and £1 for a burger... Thanks for the offer, but no thanks, I'm on a diet.
Anyway, Cardiff had 2 teams entered, the A's and the B's and based on the funky seeding system which took the national league ranking of each team into consideration, the A's were placed in the middle pool and the B's were placed in the lower pool of the championship... This was alright for us as we had the majority of our national league players in the A team, but it didn't suit some of the other teams as they were placed in high leagues, but made up of a mix of players.
We were placed in group C with Avon Y, Kingston B and Meridian Youth. When I first saw the group I was fairly apprehensive as Avon Y could have been any mix of their players, Kingston are fairly good and Meridian Youth could have been tricky. But then I met one of the regular Avon A team, who we meet in pretty much all the leagues we play in, who told me that Avon Y should be an easy win, which boosted my confidence quite a bit.
When we kicked off against Avon, we managed to dominate possession about 90%, and just like standard we let them score on the break... Going in to halftime 1-0 down we knew we were playing alright, and not converting our chances, but in the second half we seemed to pick it up a bit managed to hit the target a bit more and ended up walking away with a convincing 5-1 win.
We had an hour wait till our second game, and started well against Kingston B. With 1 minute to go and with the score at 2-2, they decided to try and play 5-out against us. Their best player was marking me as I made my way toward their goal, he started driving me at the side of the pitch, I called for the ref to look, only for the lad to say I was obstructing him! Cheeky bugger. At least the ref saw what was happening and gave me the foul which I promptly dispatched to win the game 3-2.
Another hour wait and it was time for Meridian Youth, two 16 year olds and four 14 year olds. Blimey did we make things hard for ourselves! I guess we were playing the future GB squad, but for now they were just puny humans. Luckily we walked away with a 4-3 win.
And that was the first group stage done! With a full 9 points and unbeaten. This put us top of our group and meant that we would be playing in the next group phase in Group H with Cherwell A and Welsh Warriors.
We were scheduled in to play Cherwell that evening, and we feared the worst, seeing as we played them last year in National Division 3 and lost twice! We kicked off against them with their standard bup bup bup bup as the chaser sprints for the ball, which has become something that we all like to laugh at, and probably what caused us to go 3-0 down within the first few minutes, giving me the fear that we were going to be spanked harder than Max Mosely at a Nazi party! But we rallied and managed to bring it back to 3-3 and then like two cars racing in a movie we were back and forth with them 4-3, 4-4, 5-4, 5-5 but in the end they pipped us to the finish line beating us 6-5. Phil even got a goal which is a rarity and so to commemorate this and to show off some of my new photo editing skills, I've made his goal into a gif.
If you check out Make The Consequences you will see how we created the awesome panoramic time-lapse sequences (when we get round to making that blog!).
After a long day 1, no one particularly fancied the traditional curry at the Balti Cuisine, so we forewent the Aberfan arranged BBQ and all headed back to our respective houses for a nice sleep (as we were on the first game at 8am against the Welsh Warriors).
Day 2 rolled around and was a much nicer day, the rain of day 1 had mostly cleared and there were a few patches of sun!
We knew that Cherwell had beaten the Welsh Warriors by 2 goals the previous day, so we knew that we would finish above them in Group H with either a win or a draw. The Welsh Warriors weren't really that Welsh, or really warriors. They were made up of two Bude players and 4 Chester (I think) players, one of whom was Dave Brown and they all had nice shiny DB boats and made us look like a right rabble. Just like our first game on the Saturday morning we were pretty poor and struggled to play our game against them and managed to scrape a 2-2 draw, both scored by me :)
Coming second in group H put us into the 13th to 16th pool, this may sound bad, but we were the middle pool, so the maximum we could have finished if we had beaten Cherwell was 11th :(
Our game to see if we were 13th/14th or 15th/16th happened to be against Meridian Youth. Which we thought was a bit silly seeing as we'd beaten them the day before, but they must have played well to get back in it! We ended up dominating them and walking away with a 4-1 win as we defended really well and used our strength advantage to bully them a bit!
This meant we could finish 13th or 14th, and at the time none of us realised that 13th place overall was actually 3rd in pool 2 which would have been the bronze medal! As such we didn't seem to play with any gusto against Aberfan B. We allowed their best player far too much time to dribble in from the corners and he scored a few and I think we ended up losing 3-2. But it was a fun game, and I got some good footage for the video which is the main thing!
After we were finished we had a couple of team photos and went for a pub lunch! I don't even know who won the tournament, but I can only assume it was Meridian C as they looked a different class to the rest of the top teams!
It's not the greatest photo, but Matt didn't look at the camera in any of them!
