Apologies for the absence of last week's post, I was still moving in and tired and it sorta slipped my mind. My bad. I know this week's is late but I've been busy today and after the weekend I've had I'm absolutely knackered!
So this weekend was the weekend of Lads on Tournament....and what a weekend it was! I am practically dead after playing all weekend. First time I've done anything physically active since coming home for the summer and it has pretty much killed me. I've got all of the muscle aches under the sun. I've been looking forward to this weekend for a while now and for good reason. It was a fantastic warm up for the upcoming season and I'm sooooo glad I played. It showed me just how out of practice I've become over the summer and how badly I've let my fitness slip.
Originally I was just meant to be playing for Lincoln....however one of the open teams run by our Captain Jack 'Sparrow' had a bunch of last minute drop outs and so me, Will, Ian and Lex were picked up to play for them. I was also informed I was to be captain for Lincoln this weekend as Sparrow wasn't playing for us and Tomo wasn't present for the weekend. This instantly made me nervous as I'm a terrible leader, especially when playing with team-mates who have been playing for alot longer than me. I mean how can I call the play when the people I'm playing with know what I'm doing better than I do? So I was really only captain when sitting having the team talk with the other team...which would be fine but I generally have no idea what I'm talking about...I felt like I was just rambling for the most part but hey ho. I'm not sure what the other players thought about my performance as captain, hopefully I wasn't too bad.
I was also nervous about playing for two teams after so long of not doing anything, especially since the team I was playing pick up for was set up by Jack and one of his school friends. Now Jack used to play for a team called Stags, these kids came from a juniors school that teaches ultimate and are arguably one of the best teams I've seen. Jack and Andy (His mate) left the school and the team but decided to make their own team, named Stage 2. So I'm not sure how to feel about being asked to pick up...part of me was nervous as hell, scared that I'd fuck up and bring the team down and the other part of me was a little flattered that I got asked to play. I mean maybe I was just being asked to make up the numbers, or maybe they thought I was good enough to warrant the chance to play for them. I guess I'll never know but still I was scared I'd be a let down. I also didn't want to dedicate myself to playing for them as I was captain for Lincoln so I couldn't go balls out for Stage, they weren't my priority....the strange thing being....I think I actually played better for Stage than I did for Lincoln....
My performance as a player is far more important to me. I don't think I played my best frisbee by any means but it wasn't my worst...which I was expecting to after 3months of not handling a disc. The Saturday was very hit and miss. Had its ups and downs. Mostly downs if I'm honest. We had some awesome moments but also some horrible ones too, which I guess is mostly down to the rustiness of summer and re-adjusting to a new team line-up. There's always some time needed to adjust to a new line-up, learning how each person moves and behaves on pitch. After that I think things picked up and we started to feel alot more familiar with the players we were working with (Lincoln consisted of Me, Will, Cat, Chris, Matt, Alana and Jon. Stage 2 consisted of Me, Will, Andy, Jack, Alana, Ian and Lex). Towards the end of the day the lack of summer activity's effect on my fitness became quite apparent and I started to flag quite quickly. I mean hell, after my first match of the day I felt awful! I guess I was expecting myself to be able to explode out of the gates and hold the same pace all match long but that really....really didn't happen. After that though I seemed to be able to find my pace and the exertions didn't seem to be so bad.
I woke up into Sunday bleary eyed and full of muscle aches already from the day before. I can say that Sunday went a helluvalot better than Saturday. I think on Saturday I managed to score a couple points against BFG, a team who pride themselves on having an average height of 6ft something, which is probably my highlight of the day. Sunday was full of much better times, we won distinctly more games than the day before and we all seemed to be working better as a team (both Stage and Lincoln). The muscle aches were a little more pronounced after a nights sleep on them and playing again hurt for a bit until everything loosened back up and eased back into the familiar movements. That being said I'm in absolute agony right now....but still! We all seemed to be playing a damned sight better and hopefully my performance wasn't too disappointing throughout the day. The Lincoln/Danger game will stick in my head though for possibly one of the most intense games I've ever played! The scoreline was something like 6-3 to Danger by the end and holy hellfire was it a great game! We didn't have Chris for the match as he is one of the Danger lads but even still we gave them a helluva fight. Our defence really gave them something to work around and even though they ran us hard we scored a couple decent points against them (which is an achievement in itself) and stopped them from getting into double figures (which is another achievement). That in itself shows me that I must have improved at least a little bit from when I started, I mean yeah it wasn't all my effort and my teammates are far better than me so they deserve most of the credit, but surely I must have improved a bit to manage to help pull that off.
It got to the end of Sunday's play when I was literally a walking corpse. There was nothing left in the tank and only one game left to play for Stage 2 and I could relax I gave it what I had left. It was the spoon final against Smart Casuals (shortened to Smasuals- pronounced "Schmazles" in my head) and those guys and girls are some speedy little bastards. I mean hells bells did they work us hard. For our last game of the day they were amazingly energetic. They're always a fun team to play against and always a good laugh and a good match. If I'm honest, I've never been so happy to hear the final buzzer in a game before. I was almost asleep on my feet by the time that match ended. We had to iron man the match because Lex and Ian disappeared outside after their match with Lads on Tour just before Stage 2 went on and didn't come back in to sub for us. So we were dying upwards by the end of the match, after playing all weekend for two teams and the last 19min match without a sub we were practically dead. Me and Alana got outside not knowing who had actually won that match. As it turns out we did! Which surprised us both, I'm pretty sure we were behind in that match but I honestly couldn't tell you.
All in all this weekend was pretty awesome, knackering but awesome. A great way to kick of the new season and to get back into the swing of things. I just hope that the teams I played with were happy to have me and were pleased by my performance. I felt that on times I let them down and that I hadn't played my best but we all have our off moments right? Ah well, here's to the third and final year, let's hope it's a good one!
Catch ya later folks
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