Day 6: The quarter-finals are waiting ...
The most important news of the day is, that we reached the quarter finals. After missing it very shortly in the competitions 2006 (Bremen) and 2007(Atlanta -both times with the ninth place) we are somewhat happy to break the curse of loosing by a somewhat small margin in the very last moment.
This time we had both - bad and good luck. The first games against OxBlue and OPU Hana went very well. We won 2:1 against OxBlue, which performed very good for their first competition, and 2:0 against OPU Hana, which had a strong team during the qualification, but showed a strange behaviour in these matches. They defended with almost all players beginning at the middle line, and gave up ball possession when entering our half. Though there was no chance of conceiving a goal, scoring was quite hard (but not impossible).
After a break due to the other teams games we played against Nemesis and AmoiensisNQ. Nemesis is well known to us, and in the last competitions the results against them were quite balanced. This years competition made no difference - we played 1:1. They got in front with an early goal, but then our team stayed constant and was able to score and reach a draw. The next game was meant when I speak about bad luck. We lost 0:6 against AmoiensisNQ, because our goalie had disconnected. This has never happened in the last 3 years and we were very surprised about that. If we had won (which was not
very unlikely because in our test games we almost always won), we had good chances of a second place in that round (the Brainstormers are again very strong).
The next match was against the Brainstormers (the champion of 2007) themselves. As expected we lost (4:0). Probably, if we encounter them in a later round, we could tune our team especially against them, but that is no god tactic in a round where you have 6 different opponents. Now we had one last game against Leakin Drops - an iranian team, which on a win would ensure the entry to the quarter finals. Luckily that team was the weakest, and we expected a clear win. This time it came different - DAInamite showed some strange behaviours, and although we scored the first goal, the Leakin'Drops often came close to our goal. One time they missed our goal by a very small margin ... Then
the luck turned once more. As with our team before one agent of the Leakin'Drops disconnected for some unknown reason, and we had an advantage of securing the win. Maybe that was too much of good luck, or maybe the competition machines had some network problems. Anyhow - one agent of team DAInamite disconnect as well (luckily not the goalie this time,
that would be the worst case), and for the last 1000 cycles (100 seconds) the game was dynamite for our nerves. Finally we won with 1:0 and reached our first quarter final ever.
Tomorrow, group F runs, and we have no games on that day. Though we surely will use the time to improve and debug our team, today we need to recover. We spent the whole night without sleep to get the best out of our framework, and then we had a very stressing day by watching the curious games.
By the way, if it works, I will upload some flash files of the matches in the next time. This became a littlebit difficult because of some changes to the currently used server software.
Tomorrow we will check out who is our next opponent. Probably this will be Oxsy, the team from Romania against which we played in the first round. But others are also possible.
This much for today. Here is the table of our games in compact notation:
Group E
- DAInamite : OxBlue 2:1
- DAInamite : OPU Hana 0:2
- DAInamite : Nemesis 1:1
- DAInamite : AmoiensisNQ 0:6
- DAInamite : Brainstormers 0:4
- DAInamite : Leakin'Drops 1:0
Overall result
- Points: 10
- Placement: 3 of 7
- First opponent in quarter final: 2. Place of Group F
Team DAInamite
