From Tom White, written on the day before their final game:

A very tight and hotly contested game ending in a [16-14] loss to Duke sums our tournament up. We never managed to properly fire on all cylinders for a whole game, and we seemed to have an unlimited supply of out-of-character individual errors. We had some great patches with everyone the team playing awesomely, and there is a great feeling from all that they wouldn’t want to be playing with anyone else.
Tomorrow we play for 19th. Not where we’d hoped to be at the end of a hard week. But I think it’s pretty much right, and we’re all proud of what we’ve achieved together.

Click below to see all of Brighton’s results.

Pool Games:
Brighton Ultimate 17 – 08 guayota ull (Spain)
Brighton Ultimate 13 – 17 Upsadaisy (Austria)
Brighton Ultimate 17 – 03 Brazzinga (Brazil)
Brighton Ultimate 13 – 17 AMP (USA)

Power Pool Games:
Brighton Ultimate 13 – 09 Credo
Brighton Ultimate 13 – 15 Newcastle Pie Wagon
Brighton Ultimate 08 – 15 Mental Floss Tycoons

17-20 Bracket Playoff:
Brighton Ultimate 14 – 16 Duke

19/20th Place Finals:
Brighton Ultimate 18 – 16 SQOAL

Meanwhile, Brighton Open had a lot of really close matches, only winning 2 of their 7 games. Despite a low finish of 37th place, they gave their opponents a really tough time and showed that they deserved to be competing at XEUCF.

Check back in a day or two for some photos from the tournament.

You can follow our progress by checking the Brighton Ultimate Twitter feed, which will be updated live throughout the tournament. The final placings will be posted here next week along with a link to some photos from the tournament.

A few weeks earlier, Brighton also went to the UK mixed national ultimate championships and maintained this year’s excellent mixed division performances with a third place finish.

Good job everyone who played! Now we head into the long, dark, muddy and wet winter season (as opposed to the long, bright, muddy and wet summer season) and train up for next year…

London Winter League 3
Open – 2nd (div 1)
Mixed – 7th (div 1)

Tour 0
Brighton 1 – Moved up from 6th to 1st, putting them as A Tour 6th seeds for Tour 1
Tournament report excerpt from Tom:

We were up against Masters again for the final. Luckily Warrior found us another pitch, which wasn’t just a mud bath. We stuck to our zone up- and down-wind, and the Masters played it very well. They dumped and swung and poked little ones through with great patience and accuracy. Brickers did a lot of the chasing and was a formidable force, making all throws difficult. After a couple of points with the wind, we broke out of their zone and took a point against the wind. Masters stayed patient, but every 20th or 30th pass we’d get a turn. Sometimes the wind would lift the disc, sometimes they’d over throw it – and lets not forget Ryan’s layout D in the wall, that we converted into an up-wind point. Finally time goes with us 6-3 up game to 7. We have the wind, and a huck on 9 is brought down by Jack with a massive grab in the zone for the win.

Nothing to it.

Brighton 2 – Moved up from 24th to 23rd, putting them as B Tour 9th seeds for Tour 1.
Report excerpt from Mediocre:

Last in our pool were #1 seeds Discuits 1 and they quickly justified their seeding with a 5-1 half-time score. Maybe they gave up… maybe we relaxed… I don’t know (but I want to)… and we went on to play some awesome ultimate and win the second half 5-4. 5 points off Discuits was apparently as much as they’d lost in their previous 3 games. Well played BU 2!

Cross-over time now and we were keen to get the silly 24v31 game out the way and take this rich vein of form into the all-important 24v15 game and our chance of the big time! But… we were scheduled on Pitch 15 and had to wait for the Women to finish first, meaning we had a 90-minute wait. Then it started raining.
This proved too much and we LOST to EMO 2, 6-5. Arse-end ultimate for us then!
No, wait. That wasn’t OUR hooter! Yippee – a second chance. We cut our line, kept our nerve and came back to win 8-6. Phew.

“The bad weather forecast didn’t materialise luckily for us, it was just a bit windy and a little cold, too cold for Fire of London it turned out as Brighton beat them 7-6. We took a 5-0 lead with some nice offence and tough D, Roach even got a callahan.

Next up was a fresh faced Ltd Release, again we started well with some good D and excellent long throws, special mention to Chris who skied Adian in the zone for a nice score. Final score 13-6.

Lastly was Revolution, old studenty guys. They only had 8 players and are old, so we took no pity on them and crushed them 13-3, kudos to Rimjob who was all over them and seemed to be everywhere on the pitch at once.”

Winning all our games meant we ended up in the #1 spot – that’s right, we’re winning the London Winter League open division! Hopefully we can maintain this awesomeness, and the Mixed team can make a good comeback when they reappear for the January event.

Meanwhile, here are the latest stats for WIBL along with commentary from Evil:

“The table has been updated and a lot has changed around the middle section. The top four remain in the same position with Basic Schooling very much in hand to take the top spot going into the second group stage/quarter after they manage a win over the reigning champions.

Also this week saw the first win for the Panthers, beating Pirates and moving very close to Squaws with just one point separating the two.”

Next WIBL event is 10th of January – if you want to play just come along to Moulecomb leisure centre at 8pm, there’s always a team that needs pickups.

Next London Winter League is 13th of January – if you want to play sign up on the YahooGroups database, or email or speak to Felix to put your name down.

A final note about practices, don’t forget that tonight is the last practice before Christmas; the first practice in January is Saturday the 5th. Hope you all have a great holiday!