There are a couple of games worth mentioning. The first Firestorm vs Karma was an interesting game to watch. After the first couple of points I thought Firestorm was going to run away with it, they were looking the much stronger team, but the Karma boys fought back through the hands of Joel Pillar. What pleased me most about the fightback, and in particular Joel, was the defence. Joel is a defensive receiver on the Dingoes team, but here in SA he's most often a lazy handler. It was really good to see him laying out and reading the play to get blocks, it's the first time I've actually seen him play properly. Last year he was too broken to play effectively at nationals, and there is no footage of him on the worlds DVD, so it was great to see him going all out.
It should be noted that Firestorm didn't have Mike Nield in this game either. He would have made a difference given the lack of wind and the throwing abilities of Firestorm. I don't think the inclusion of Finn in the Firestorm team helped them either. Not because Finn's a terrible player, but because there is no way in hell Dutch and Matt in particular were going to let him win. I thought letting Finn defend Dutch would give Karma an advantage, but in the end it just resulted in a lot of foul calls.
I think Karma surprised everyone with their win and they were pretty happy about it, but the rematch was a very different story. Karma lost Joel to a dislocated shoulder and Firestorm gained Mike Nield. If anyone stood short of Nield, he just headed for the endzone and scored. Karma didn't have anyone who could stop him and it was obvious from the sideline what was going to happen.
The final was fun to watch, although I'm not sure it was good ultimate. Chilly's offense just moves the disc around until Gak get's it, then he throws something crazy and they score. He threw an almost full field length hammer. That's a poor throwing choice for anyone. I think Gak dumped it once in the whole game. Honestly, if you're marking someone and Gak has the disc, mark them deep, force them under. If they go deep, Gak is going to hit them for the score.
I would love to see Gak as a receiver. He's a billion feet tall and looks like he's probably got some hops, yet I saw him jump for a disc once in the whole game. I would love to see him at full stretch skying someone, so it was a real shame Matt Dowle wasn't playing to perhaps force him down the field a little. Watching him on defense didn't teach me anything either. A lot of poaching and a lot of ambling around. If I was a coach, I'd be yelling at him.
Throw of the tournament for me was Warrick Shephard's breakside scoober for a score. I didn't know you could throw bullet scoobers, but apparently you can.
On the womens side of things, I really wanted to see Box beat Wildcard. It looked like they were going to do so a bunch of times, but Wildcard just reeled it back in. So many hucks for a women's game, but I guess that was due to the fantastic conditions.
All in all, an entertaining nationals, although the party sucked balls until it ended. The beer was horrible, the room was too dark to see, too loud to hear and you couldn't drink outside where the pizza was. Separating pizza and beer should be outlawed. The drinks service was slow and the serving people were overly stressed. I talked to Tim Booth in the street after the event and he was quite drunk, I'm astounded he didn't fall off the roof and hurt himself and/or someone else. From an OHS standpoint, I don't think canning the party and kicking a hundred drunk people out onto the street was the correct thing to do. It took many people an hour or more to get a taxi. Some people just decided to walk into Freo, which didn't strike me as a good idea, especially wearing only a g-string. There was also no-where to go after the party, which I found quite annoying as I wasn't playing.
And for future reference... include a disc in the player pack. Always.
