It has been three days since we arrived in Italy. Normally the finals of a torunament would be allready over but here at worlds it is just the beginning of the as we have been told biggest Ultimate tournament of all time, with over 4000 players. In this three days we established a new version of spikeball, lurked around in the parking lot and bought very usefull stuff at the nearby decathlon (several times). Before we ran out of money today we finally took our step on the fields and the international Ultimate stage to challenge the best. Our first opponent is Phoenix from Ottawa / Canada, the Nr 1 seed in our pool.
The coaches announced, that we are going to play the game with our best possible lines to find out where we stand, and maybe suprise and beat the “big musceled” guys from americas north. The game starts and they quickly hit us with a break. At the beginning they force the hucks quite often, which was quite risky, due to the conditions of the fields, but still manage to put a lot of them in the zone. Though it was the first game in this tournament the groud was swamp-like, people slipped and got overthrown easily. Our offence manages to keep us in the game, sometimes with very creative, but effective passes, while our defence struggles putting enough pressure on their open side. Halftime: 5-8. It’s time for the defence to come up with a plan, so we decide to contest their openside throws with a force middle zone. And it works. Quite confused in the beginning, they have turnovers in their following 2 offense points and we manage to convert one of them. On the third one they adapt their movements leaving us no chance to make it a close game. The game ends: 10:15.
Quite happy with the result and our performance, we start jump into our next game, our neighbours Lézer Pávák from Hungary. We just have met them weeks before at the european regionals, where we beat them 15:7. Before the game starts there is only one thing for the coaches to tell us: The next one and a half hours are buisnesstime. Everyone is going to give everything at every point to score as easy as we can and to let them make as few points as possible, this time with the whole 22-men-squad. Lézer Pávák has to experience painfully what buisnesstime is all about: FWD>> kicks in with a 6:2 lead. We convert every throw away, handblock,defense, missread they give us, while our offense scores within seconds and without mercy. After halftime they manage to keep up, even get closer once, slowing down the train that was about to run over them. We take a timeout at 12:8, and michi and Hannes throw a big load of coal into the weakened fire to ignite it again and put the train back on track. the result speaks for itself: 15:8. Satisfied with the results of the day, we queue in for the endless line at dinnertent. At the dinner Dominik encouraged everybody to compare their quadriceps to his. Nobody knows why and Mr. Mo ruins a chair and Flo gets really good at splashing directly into eyes with our new spraybottle. Wondering what the next days will hold for us we leave the deserted place (we were the last team), framing some volunteers letting them believe that we missed the last bus.
