Millennium 2012 Paris World Cup – part 2

Day 2

If the first day was the definition of perfect, the second and third days were the complete opposite of that. We woke up early for our morning game and at that moment the weather seemed fine. A bit chilly but still sunny. There was a small hope in our minds that the weatherman would have predicted wrong and the rainstorm would just vanish in to thin air… It didn’t. The other thing to darken our day was a error made by the Marshalls on our Friday scores. Before our second game on Friday one of our younger players returned our player list to the Marshalls as needed. Only this time they asked for a signature on the paper. Not knowing any better the signature was given and that was it. Only after the game we noticed that we weren’t asked a confirmation on the score of the game and to our surprise the Marshalls had messed up the final score. The score on the card said 3-2 instead of 4-2. We tried to change this with the organizers but even the word of the Stockholm Ignition captain didn’t help. The messed up score stayed on the board and would cause havoc to our upcoming games.

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Millennium 2012 Paris World Cup – part 1

Firstly a small apology to all our readers. It seems i had developed some sort of writer’s block during the long season and simply could not get this report out of me. Maybe the long season strained me even more I thought… Whatever the reason sorry for the delay and here it comes. Enjoy.

The Millennium. I’ve often wondered what is it that draws me here. I mean it’s silly to fly all the way from Finland to play a tournament in some European city and pay yourself sick doing it. Or is it? I’ve played tournaments all around Finland and abroad just always come to the conclusion that the Millennium is THE tournament to play in Europe and there is none quite like it. This time it was the turn of the Paris World Cup.

The Team

We were supposed to play this tournament with just Helsinki Cyclone guys but since the accident of our own mr. Frontside and the joyful but badly timed promotion of Toni Sireni we ended up with a team different than usual. Helsinki Cyclone was represented by this years undeniable new Cyclone talents Tomi Lindholm and Wilhe Knaapi and the older section consisting of Olli Kemppi and yours truly… me Pertti Berg. Our team was also strengthened by former Cyclone and now Trivoga player Jesse Johansson and the recent Finnish League Champion from Field Fighter Tolik Zubarev

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The Finnish league’s final leg: Tallinn

The Estonian Capital Tallinn is only 30km from Helsinki via sea route. You can actually see it from the highest buildings in Helsinki and once there was even a discourse in the media that the two cities should be combined as one mega city. For us going to Tallinn is always fun. The prices on everything are much lower and the city is a really cool place to party. This time we were up for a real treat. The Estonian team Adrenaliin, which has been playing the Finnish series for a couple of years now, were organizing the season finale in their home turf, which for us meant combining the two favorites of ours: Paintball and partying.

As it seems with all our tournaments this year there was a big bang to endure just before the main event. Our main back player and gun torrent Sami Turunen had been talking about taking up skateboarding again throughout the summer. He used to skate quite a lot in his youth… which was before he was almost 2 meters tall, almost a 100 kilos worth of pure muscle and a cop. This is the guy who went off to ski for the first time after a while and came back with some broken ribs and strained abs. He’s also the only guy who’s ever managed to break himself on our turf field, Tuusula Grind… you can probably see were this is going. So he got himself a board and some protective gear and went for just a small taster at a local ramp. It was the week before the Tallinn tournament but as we say in Cyclone just a cobweb thin taster wont hurt if you’re really careful. It didn’t, all went well… that day. The next day he went off again and… well I guess it’s better if you’ll just see for your self from this dramatic re-enactment: Skating for Dummies

The doctors say that he will get the cast of his leg somewhere around Christmas and to all of us he shall now and ever after be called Frontside Turunen according to a song by an artist called Robin (the Finnish equivalent to Justin Bieber)

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