To start Saturday we had one victory in and one tight loss in our pocket. We were anticipating a tight game against our good friends the Amsterdam Sabotage 2 so we changed our strategy so that we would push way harder from the midfield and M-side to compensate the lack of aggression seen in our games on Friday. The winner would secure a spot on Sunday so the stakes were high.
The game started with a good break from us, we shot out the snake-side front which opened the way in. We got the second and third body out via a run through from the snake-side. Unlucky for us, at the same time our M-side fell and Sabotage tied the game to 2 against 2. A second later two more bodies fell and the game was a 1 on 1. Janne managed to shoot out his opponent and secure the point at same that Sabotage threw in the towel. Later we heard that they had actually shouter “tower” and the head ref had just heard it wrong. 1-0 for Cyclone. 2-0 came relatively easy and it seemed that the changes in our strategy were working perfectly. The Sabotage boys were taking punches but the game was not over. By tightening their break and turning more lanes to our snake-side they changed the tide and took three points in a row. The game was now 2-3 and we had our backs against the wall. We pushed hard on the M-side to take the game back and tied to 3-3 with 1:37 on the clock. The next point was ours from the beginning. We took out two guys from the break and our field wide push worked perfect and we had three bodies left to push the buzzer. The game seemed to be ours… we were wrong. An old hit was found buried deep within my pack and a 1-4-1 was called. At the same time Janne made the mistake of putting his barrel sock on while the game was still on and he was taken out. No point, with 0:17 on the clock. As expected both teams just waited the time out and the game went to extended time. The last point of the game started tightly with both teams making their brake but soon Sabotage got the upper hand and grinded our players out taking the victory 3-4.
We were devastated from the loss. We were all 100% sure that Sunday had slipped through our fingers and this was it. We started packing and decided that the only reasonable thing to do was shout “Finn’o’clock” and hit the bars. I have to raise my hat for the organizers for opening a beer tent right beside the CPL stands, brilliant idea. After the games a couple more at the hotel bar and after that food at the steak house and of course some sitting outside the hotel rooms with just a couple more beers… 1:36am my phone rang. It was Jii and he had some news. He had opened his laptop to see our final position and found out that it was 12. We were in and we were playing Sunday. Oh dear! We didn’t want to wake everyone up so we decided to wind our alarm clocks to 6:45, meet outside at 7:00 am and hope that our game wouldn’t be the first one. The only ones who knew this were Jii, Nysty and me.
6:45 I woke up my roommate Joel and I have to say that Paintballers are a rare breed. With no complaining and no arguing Joel started to pack his stuff. The only thing heard was a muttered “kaikenlaista sitä sattuu” (what weird things happen). The same reaction came from Janne and Sami as well. 7:30 we were all at the fields ready for action…ish. We found that our game was against 7eme Companie Nancy at 9:30 so plenty of time to get ready for the rematch.
The first two points were our wake up call. 7eme was shooting us out like we were still drunk and the game was 0-2. A quick change in strategy and the game started rolling for us. Point after point our game got stronger and their game weaker. For the first time in this tournament the team welded together and 7eme had snowballs chance in hell. We took the game 4-2 and climbed to the top 8. Afterwards we couldn’t help wondering should we play more often with a hangover.
The next game was against Redball Paris at the SPL-field. This presented a problem since we hadn’t walked this field at all because it still had the Malaga layout on Thursday we had also heard that the marshaling was way more strict. A quick walk before our game revealed that the field was indeed very different and the team who could first adopt the new lines would have the advantage. The game started going sour from the first point. We had a great break shooting out two bodies but after that we got two 1-4-1 penalties which completely destroyed the point. 0-1 to Redball. The Redball guys had been watching our earlier game and new exactly how to take us out. They shot tight lines to our front players and completely blocked our game. To make things worse we got more 1-4-1:s during the next points. Total annihilation 0-4, in just 4 minutes. As I watched the later games on the SPL field I saw that the refs were giving out 1-4-1 like it was an assembly line, even in cases where just taking the player out would have been sufficient. In my opinion it was affecting the games in a bad way. But like I said, that’s only my opinion.
Our final position for Basildon 2010 was 8th. It’s the best result this season and we are thrilled by it.
Final words
As always Millennium Basildon was an excellent tournament. Yes, it’s in the middle of nowhere and the hotels rob you blind but this is irrelevant when you look at the big picture. Paintball is at its best when you can just concentrate in the game and not burden your mind with organizational details. In Basildon you could do just that. All and all I had a blast with our Cyclone family, I wish I could do this every weekend.
We send huge thanks to all our friends from Amsterdam Sabotage 2, Uppsala Sugar Daddies, London Tigers 2 and Instinct Gemoss Riga for all the help during the tournament and even a bigger one to Kalle and Harri from RumaQ, we couldn’t have done this without you. You are both now honorary members of the Cyclone family and we won’t forget it.
