EuroBowl 2018 - Cardiff

November 08, 2018

EuroBowl 2018 - Cardiff

It's taken me a while to get around to typing this up but I wanted to get this written up so it was here on the blog for the record.

Way back in October 2017, everyone in the BB community had just come back from the EuroBowl in Portugal and were saying how fantastic it was. I really didn't want to miss out again so my friend Andrew (Mr_Frodo) and I started making plans on attending this year's tournament in Cardiff, Wales. Our friend Gary (Wotfudboy), who is another BB tournament regular that we've know for a few years, agreed to join our team so we could enter the EurOpen.

Just to backtrack a little, the EuroBowl is a national team tournament where teams of eight coaches from different nations play against each other. Running alongside this is an open tournament where teams of three coaches join together by nationality or just friendship and have their own tournament at the same venue.

As it was my idea to enter the tournament, I was team captain - but we needed a suitable team name. Gary lives quite a way from Andrew and I so it didn't feel right calling the team after a town or our local leagues. In the end we agreed that as we all like Star Trek and we didn't really fancy our chances, we'd be the guys who turned up at the tournament and get killed each round. Team Red Shirts it is then!

We all had to use different teams so I opted for Wood Elves, Andrew had Dwarfs and Gary used Necromantic.

My roster for this was :

Wardancer (Strip Ball)
Wardancer (Frenzy)
3 x Catchers (Block)
Thrower (Leader
Treeman
4 x Linemen
1 x Reroll
Apothecary

We had new red polo shirts with our NAF names made, got some Star Trek badges to pin on and headed to Cardiff with our families in tow. The hotel we were in had some wall art that really cemented the fact that we were in Wales! I put my new lucky Star Trek socks on and we got stuck in.

For Round 1 we were drawn against a team called Warriors Southern Chapter. One of their members had dropped out the Thursday before but thanks to social media and the help of the NAF, they found a replacement. I brought along my Lizardman team for him to borrow for the weekend. We did okay in this round - I won 3-0 against a Human team, Andrew won 1-0 against Wood Elves and Gary lost 2-1 vs the Lizardmen. As we had two wins and a loss, we counted as having won the round.

For Round 2, we were playing The Looping Loons who'd driven all the way from Aberdeen the day before. These were really great guys to play against and chat with. I managed to win my game against Chaos Dwarfs 1-0, Andrew lost 2-1 against Dark Elves and Gary got a 1-0 win against Lizardmen. This meant another team win - awesome!

For Round 3 were were up on Table 5 as we were in 10th place at this time (out of 70 teams). We were drawn against Danelaw who were all unsurprisingly Danish. I managed to pull of a couple of 1 turn touchdowns in this game - and I won against Dark Elves with a 3-2 score. Andrew got a 0-0 draw against Undead and Gary lost 2-1 against Wood Elves. So with a win, a draw and a loss it meant we're drawn this round. We were in 9th place overall and, somehow, after three wins I was in 2nd place in the EurOpen individual standings (out of 210!) Unbelievable!

The next day we found we were facing a very strong French team called Pilous. I ran out of luck this game and I lost against Lizardmen 2-1. I'd set up for a final 1 turn attempt and my opponent got a Perfect Defence kick off so he just moved all his players out of the way to deny my chance at a one-turn. A very close game though! Andrew got a 1-1 draw against Undead and Gary saved the day by winning 2-1 against Dark Elves after an amazing 1 turn touchdown scored by his werewolf. Thanks to him we got another drawn round!

Game 5 and we were playing against another French team Men's in Block who were really great guys. I fought out a 2-2 draw against Amazons, Andrew lost 2-0 vs Undead and Gary lost 1-0 vs Wood Elves. We finally lost a round - but not a bad showing against some really great coaches.

For our final game we couldn't believe who our opponents were - Team Unicorn who was made up of the guys running the HEBBL league that Andrew and I played in this year! All the way to Cardiff and we end up playing our league mates! I fought out a tough 3-3 draw against Wood Elves, Andrew won 2-0 against Dark Elves and Gary won 1-0 vs yet more Lizardmen.

Having won the final round it meant our tally for the weekend was three wins, two draws and just one loss. Individually, I got three wins, two draws and one loss. Andrew got two wins, two draws and two losses and Gary got three wins and three losses. I finished 32nd, Gary 107th and Andrew 110th.

It was a really good weekend and I think we did ourselves proud.