The finals for both Grade A and Grade B were on in Wellington from Saturday 31st May to Monday 2nd June. I was a bit worried beforehand given that the competition was in a pool with only one pitch, and so would be running from 6am to midnight each day, apart from Monday when we finished in the early afternoon. The organisers split it so that B Grade was in the morning and A Grade in the evening each day. As I was playing in both Grades I ended up with games on Saturday from 7am to 11.30pm, Sunday from 8am and going until 10.30pm and starting on Monday at 6.40am! Very unsociable hours!
Dave loaded up the Barracuda Fun Bus (his van) with 9 of us and we set off about 3pm on Friday afternoon to drive from Auckland to Wellington. One of the passengers is a teacher so we had to wait for her to finish school before leaving. It was a bank holiday weekend so you can imagine what traffic was like on the trip down. We arrived at our accommodation at about 1.30am and went straight to bed. As I said earlier, I had to play at 7am so I wasn’t too happy or awake when my alarm went in the morning!
We had just one B Grade game on Saturday and as we were down to four players we recruited Cam’s wife, Nicolette, to play with us. With a tight defence, a few good attacks and a lot of time wasting on our parts we won that game and were feeling good!
Later in the day our A Grade campaign got going again and in what became our typical style for the weekend we played great first halves to each of our games, but couldn’t quite keep it up for the second half. The team harmony was greatly improved from Christchurch though which was quite a relief.
With far from enough sleep I got up on Sunday morning to start playing at 8am. We recruited Mel from my A Grade team to play with our B Grade team so we had six players, but three of them (the three girls) were all playing on two teams for the weekend, so we rotated subbing between us. Using the same tactics as the day before, we wasted a lot of game time passing the ball out the back in attack, and won all our games.
The same could not be said of the A Grade team, though in our last game of the day we played a stormer of a first half and were actually winning 4v1! Unfortunately it’s a game of two halves, and our second half wasn’t quite so good!
The luck of our B Grade team wasn’t to last through to Monday. Unfortunately the opposition had gotten too bored of our passing the ball out the back and decided to come out and pressure us there to their success. The finals finished with my team placed 8th and the other Auckland team placed 7th. They were designed to be even teams and proved to be just that. We played each other three times and won one game each and drew the third. The ladies team kept up their record and came 6th in Grade A, while the Men’s team came 5th in their division.
After a busy weekend we had to drive all the way back up to Auckland again. We shared the driving and had a little detour imposed on us by Peter who doesn’t see signposts while driving and missed a turn off on his shift. In the end we got home just after 11pm and Seán and I hit the sack and weren’t seen until quite late on Tuesday!
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