Well that was fast...

The Thursday night competitive league finished it's regular season last week with the Evil Empire's 19-12 loss to the Hell Spawns. That loss put us at a final record of 5-4-1 and a third place finish.

The one tie was against our friend Helen's team Dodgebull 2. Really, we won that 15-14 game but Dodgebull disputed the score, saying that it was a 14-14 tie. After a long hold out, I relented, since we'd already locked up our third place seeding, and the win or tie was irrelevant.

I know third place isn't great, but it's right where we wanted to be. It guaranteed that we'd make the playoffs, and we'd get to avoid our opposite numbers, the top seeded Shouldice in the first round, as they'd be playing Dodgebull who came in fourth.

However, as covered in my previous Evil Empire post, we really struggled with our psychology against the Hell Spawns. We played anxious and tight and made a lot of basic mistakes and lost 19-12.

Further, we were playing at Havergal Collegiate, a very deep gym which would expose our weak arms. This would be exasperated by the fact that My Pet Monster, our strongest arm, is in Australia.

To get over these obstacles, I made a few decisions. First of all, I underscored the importance of catching by making the Reg Dunlop Award be all about who can get the most catches while getting caught out the fewest times. I also emphasized these two important offensive strategies:

"1) Throwing as close to the centre line legitly makes a big difference. It literally subtracts metres from the distance you have to throw.

2) Throwing in tandem with at least one person in a barrage will protect both of you from being caught out, and greatly increases the chances of getting the target out."

I mentioned these points in a pre-game email, and then again in a team huddle at the start of the game. Smirnoff had played the Hellspawns in a tournament and underlined the fact that they were good catchers, so making sharp decisions while throwing was important. Before the game, 8Mile had overheard the Hellspawns talking in the change room about how the key to beating us was to get us worked up and upset and the train would come off the tracks.

So we had it all worked out for us. We would throw together, from the centre line, and then look for catches. All while being sedate.

Sedate was the operative word.

We came out with a total lack of hustle. Although we looked for catches, we did not throw from the centre line, and too often we did not throw together. We were listless. In a gigantic gym like the ones at Havergal, sweeping should be easy. However, we were so slow to act that the Hellspawns were committing to full four-ball barrages against us and still getting back most of the balls.

At one point we were losing 8-1.

Only a mid-game speech by Smirnoff turned anything around. He got people moving and we started throwing barrages. After the speech we won four rounds compared to their two, and made the game a slightly more respectable 10-5, but it was still a loss.