The day started off with mumma-prawi cooking some spring rolls (the main event for the tournament), then me heading off to the courts to sort things out. I sent a message out the night before "10 am registration, be there or don't play"... PCP has a bad habit of being fashionably late... 1.5 hours later Matty rocks up with his Death Machine and BBQ:
I missed a phone call the day before and checked my voicemail. "Gday Prawi, just calling up about the weather tomorrow, have you seen it?" So off I go to see the weather forecast. Periods of rain with a chance of a thunderstorm. Oh gawd. No worries, we play polo, a little bit of rain wont hurt right? Turns out the rain was one of our saving graces, 33 degree weather with scorching humidity, at times we were praying for rain. By the end of the day the clouds cleared and the weather was ace (albeit a bit warm).
Next up, in typical Prawi form, I left things a little late and decided to sort the brackets out the night before. Looking at our facebook invites I was expecting roughly 10 teams. okay, thats not too bad, now, lets put that into a round robin format plus a double elimination.. did the maths and realised that it would involve over 60 games. "OH SH*T", we'll never finish this tourney in time. Fortunately as we all know, facebook invites don't really count for much, we had 7 teams arrive by the start of games play. We then decided that we should play out a round robin and see how much time we would have in the end.
We drawed the 14 names out of a hat and the teams came together as follows:
Nick/Hesh - Hazards of Dukes
Scotty/Matty- Team Gerbil
Tom/Wall - Piss Buddys
Shane/Prawi - Sham WOW
TowTruck/Brad - Granny Wank
Bobby/Derren - Sea Shepards
Ash/Shane - Ginger Ninjas
The random teams pretty much turned out perfect, (imo) no team was at a super ad/disadvantage, and we were happy to welcome two new players to polo, Hesh and Shane.
We set the format to 10 minute games or first to 3 goals. This allowed for some fast exciting games, and for the 2v2 format, 10 minutes seemed like an eternity and 3 goals was enough to leave you buggered by the end of the game. Time to play some POLO: 3..2...1...
Nick and Shane jousting it out
|Ash takes a shot
Prawi making his attack. Notice the clouds and ominous weather
Derren cooking up some snags
Suddenly its HOT, time to chill in the shade
Previously known as PISS CORNER..
Chalking up the results
(thanks Lewis for taking the photos, you can see the rest of his set here)
After about 3 and a half hours the round robin was over, it flew by. The standings by then end were:
Every team managed to squeeze in a win, with ShamWow undefeated and Piss Buddys not too far behind. It was time to do some eliminating. By then we were all pretty much buggered and it was scorching hot, so we agreed on a single elimination format for the end. We drew up the tables and the tourney quickly narrowed down to the finals.
There were a few upset games within the elimination round, most notably 6th seeded Hazards of Dukes pulling out a win against the 2nd seeded team, Piss Buddys. HOD then went on to defeat Granny Wank, seeded 3rd. Before they knew it, they were in the Finals.
Ginger Ninjas won their first game in a tight battle against Team Gerbil, but were defeated by the well rested Sham Wow who got a bye due to their number 1 seeding. In the end it was Hazards of Dukes (Nick and Hesh) vs Sham WOW (Shane and Prawi), wow, Hesh and Shane, both totally new to the game, BOTH made it to the finals. Props! We let the newbies battle out the joust and the game was on. Hesh put in some gutsy attacks, at one point his whole body was over his handle bars reaching for the ball and Shane applied really good defensive pressure making hard for the opposition to score.
Hesh reaching over his bars for the ball
It came down to 2-all, next goal wins. Some tight defence on both teams made it hard to score and the ball went back and forward. In the end i got a lucky break and got into a breakaway to score the final goal of the tournament.
The end results.
1st Sham WOW (Shane and Prawi)
2nd Hazard of Dukes (Nick and Hesh)
3rd Ginger Ninjas (Ash and Shane)
3rd Granny Wank (Wristy and Brad)
7th Sea Shepards (Derren and Bobby)
7th Piss Buddys (Tom and Wall)
7th Team Gerbil (Matty and Scotty)
All in all a fantastic day of polo, thanks everyone for coming down and making it possible! Look forward to the next tourney :D
