>The issue here is with foreign teams playing a single tour event, when the Tour is clearly not designed for that I think you'll find the exception for foreign teams entering a one off tour event was in the first ever Ultime8 tour rules, and has been in there every year since (I'm sure Si Hill will correct me if I'm wrong). The tour was designed to improve the standard of the top 8 teams in the UK, with the hopeful benefit to other UK teams, but the priority was quite openly elitist. Trying to attract some big European teams to help challenge the top teams was always a priority, hence the consideration of South East locations for bids (Eastbourne, Southampton) to make it even more appealing to our continental friends.
The fact is, the tour never really appealed to many foreign teams so in that objective, it wasn't too successful. While the tour wasn't split, it wasn't much of an issue since no one was going to get excluded from a tournament and the chance to play a different team, especially when peer pools throughout had the tendancy to throw the same teams together tournament after tournament (you know the tour was supposed to be a series of 8 tournaments in the season?). Maybe this rule should have been revisited once the tour split and switching to an 18 team format I guess tried to update that. It's good to have this argument now to seek improvements for next year, and perhaps there should be a different rule for one-off foreign teams, and for foreign teams like Paddy Murphy who will commit to every tour event. Kevin. PS Love the comment about coming to ENGLAND. I guess we haven't had enough tour events in Edinburgh. __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
