Day 9 and 10: Final Games and Final Visits
The schedule for the final competition was as follows: First the placement matches for all teams above the (possibly) 5th rank where played, starting from the lowest. Even though the teams only competed for the lower places, each of them again did their best to win and to finish with a good performance. Also for us, the fifth place would be worth much more than the sixth, and thus we worked again till deep into the night. On submitting the code for the quarter finals some issues were left open or uncompleted because of time constraints, and we had the will to bring the team to its best possible strength on the last match. In fact, most of these issues seemed to be resolved in the early morning hours, such that we started a test tournament and went to bed for some hours of sleep. On the next morning we just decided to not submit one of the things we implemented (passing by tackling), because it reduced the runtime performance significantly. Everything else seemed to work quite well.
Then we drove to the venue for the last time, made a few tests and finally laid our fate into the hands of the god of bits and bytes (I've donated a few yuan the day before to him - or at least I thought it was he, but maybe I've misunderstood the writings...). The matches were quite exciting, both - those of the good teams and of the not so good ones. Ours started on 11.20. To summarise, it was a somewhat strange match. Oxsy seems to had improved its strength during the night, and we hadn't had a chance. The first goal fell very early in the first half. The next one a few moments later. Before half time, we managed to score as well, such that we had the chance to come up again. But sadly the second half went even worse, and the match was finished with 5:2 for Oxsy.
BremenA few words to the final game: The Brainstormers played against WrightEagle, aconstellation which happens in the finals for the last three years. 2006 in WrightEagle won, and became world champion. The next year - 2007 in Atlanta - the Brainstormers won very comfy. Taking into account that its team leader was the only one that tuned the team during that competition, this outcome was a very impressive result. This years final started under the assumption, that if team WrightEagle wins the first match, a second one has to take place, because WitghtEagle got to the finals via the loosers round of the double elimination (where each team has to loose twice before being eliminated from competition). The effort of team WrightEagle was easily visible when looking into their tired faces - obviously they tuned the whole night. In fact, the game of WrightEagle was completely different than that of the matches before. The whole strategy was adopted to fit to the opponent, and it seems that theyhad done well - they won the first game by 1:0. So, the decision has to bemade in another final game (the final final). Since the code was the same as before, some of us expected WrightEagle to win - but this time the defense of the Brainstormers stood upright, and after the regular time the game was a tie (0:0). Next, the extra halfs started, and a golden goal would determine the champion, if one happens. But again, both teams could not score, and finally the champion had to be decided by the penalty shootout. This was the first time ever, that the champion had to be determined by penalty shootout. WrightEagle proved their skills in that discipline during the round before, where they outperformed Helios. I don't really know how to describe best, how exciting the shootout was. Although there were only small circles running over a green area, everyone of the spectators was shouting and hoping the small white circle will either enter the black area behind the goalie (which in fact was a circle of another size), or will be intercepted by him. But once one team missed a shoot, the other could not make use of that for very long. Both teams where almost equal in strength. If the decision was not made after ten shootouts for each, the game ends, and it would be up to the committee to find a way to determine the champion. Finally - the Brainstormers could make use of one miss of team WrightEagle, and again was the winnerof the championship.
A few words to our result: Although a sixth place is not that bad (even better than our previous results), we all hoped for more. The critical match was the lost game against Helios, which was decided in the first extra half by a golden goal. If we would have won that, in my opinion, we could have became third, because Amoiensis would be defeatable as well (at least in our tests). On the other hand we had some luck as well. Oxsy is a very strong team, and we probably could have lost against them in our first match of the quarter finals (I promise to link the game logs on this site as soon as possible). Thus the sixth place is a realistic result in that it reflects our strength compared to the other teams, and keeping in mind that we are close to the teams that were ahead (ignoring the Brainstormers in that calculation :-).
Some moments after the games were over, the stress slowly dropped away from us and we began to think of something else than robocup (of course after making some photos of the other teams and us). For the last one and a half day, we intended to visit some places of Suzhou and Shanghai. Since this is the touristic part of our trip, I will omit the details except this one: China is worth a visit!!
We hope to see you soon back in Berlin
Team DAInamite
