Pretty much the exact point I made after T1 yet got no comments or reply...
Karl "Monkey Head" B.
From: Ben Heywood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [BD] B tour crossovers (again)
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 13:25:15 +0100
Sorry to labour the point (after all that email traffic after tour 1) but
I'd like to complain about the lack of crossovers at tour 3. I foolishly
didn't check the schedule when it was sent out, since the crossover issue
had been addressed at tour 2. I didn't foresee the crossovers disappearing
again, so sorry I didn't make this complaint before the tournament...
Anyway, it remains my belief that crossovers (at least) are necessary on
the B-tour. Teams are hugely variable from tour to tour in a way which is
not seen on the A tour. If the best three players turn up, a team can
easily rise 15 places from one tour to the next. The format has to allow
for this.
Specifically, this weekend: We (abstract, 3rd seeds) were in a pool with
Bristol 2 (13th seeds) and Brixton (20th). Bristol took 8 players to tour
2, and 16 players to this one. Bit of a difference there. Brixton weren't
at tour 2, so they were underseeded too.
If Brixton had won their sudden-death game against bristol, we'd have been
in the bottom 8. In fact, we ended up in the middle 8. We lost one game all
weekend, and came 9th. We played our OWN SECOND TEAM in the plate final
(for which we AGAIN didn't receive a plate, goddammit... why aren't they
being awarded this season?)
Bristol only missed a place in the final on a three-way tie, and yet
Brixton, who lost to them 15-14, couldn't finish higher than 17th. Is there
anybody out there who could seriously suggest that they 'suck it up'?
CROSSOVERS ARE AN ABSOLUTE NECESSITY!!!!
In fact, as I've said before, my (infinitely) preferred option would be to
have more (shorter) games on the saturday. An open 24 team format cannot be
decided fairly with six games each.
We'd still get to play proper 90 min games on the sunday for qf sf f in
each group of eight, and there'd be some chance that the right teams would
actually be in each of these brackets.
As I remember it, the arguments against shorter games on the B-tour mostly
revolved around the difference in TOTAL pitch time between the A and B
tours - not many people were hugely upset about the specific fact that we
didn't play 90 min games. There are such big differences in skill and
experience between the top and bottom of the B-tour that a large proportion
of saturday games don't need anything like 90 mins to decide.
And in case anyone wishes to point out that by this stage of the season the
seedings should be fairly accurate, look at it this way - if the seedings
are accurate, the pools are a waste of time, since positions won't change.
And on those occasions when positions do change in a pool, it's absolutely
inevitable that one team will get f****d over. In no respect whatsoever is
a tiny-pool (3 teams), non-crossover format a justifiable choice.
Benji
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