No Four Leaf clover for us

The second game of the day was against the Irish team. They had come out of a very tough pool that saw them go 0-5 with Columbia and Venezuela advancing to the upper bracket and shaking up the standings. They started the day with beating Netherlands and were very fired up to show that they were better than their record. We were very eager to play some good ultimate and establish our position in the lower bracket.

The game started out by trading points. The D-line was able to get a turn or two, but unable to convert into any points. The O-line was able to match the Irish for the first few points and we quickly found the game at 3-3. The D-line was able to get a turn and moved the disc down the field. James made a huge catch down the line and got slammed by an Irish player. Unfortunately, the Irish were able to reset their defense and able to shut down the dump to Ankur. After that, the Irish quickly started to take a few points advantaged and ran up the score.

Unfortunately, South Africa wasn’t able to recover. The Irish were able to take half at 9-4. The D-line went back out, but wasn’t able to get the disc back. The O-line was able to make some great movement of the field, but once again, the end zone remained elusive. The Irish threw on a junk defense that seemed to frustrate our offense and we then found ourselves down 13-4.


The O-line came back on and rediscovered a little of their magic. Pete ended up throwing a big huck up to Finn who skied an Irish player to come down with it, hit the ground on the way down, to have the disc pop up into the air, flipped around, and complete the catch with the disc landing on his chest. It was a pretty great circus catch.

The D-line was back on the field and Jit, with our 60 seconds between pulls, decided to teach us a clam. Tavish, Ankur, and myself took the handlers, Chris, Jit, and James took the clam, and Mike took the deep. Ankur trapped a handler in the back corner of the end zone, and on stall 9, they managed to hammer out and Mike crashed in to D it. But he wasn’t able to get it, and the Irish were heading to the endzone. But for running a defense that we learned about 15 seconds before the pull, we did a pretty damn good job. Other than not getting the D.

Well, the score tells the rest of the story. After the game, we circled up and gave credit where it was due. The Irish simple outplayed us. We would have loved to play better, but sometimes a bad game just happens. Tomorrow, we are looking to get back to some good, beautiful Ultimate against Germany and the Netherlands. Sorry for the short blog tonight, but we ended up having a great time tonight with the whole team. We'll post about it tomorrow and also about the awesome game we had against Mexico! Just a short post tonight (a little bit tired at the moment), but definitely more to come.