Now before all the wolves start howling, I thought I had better pre-empt them by giving my opinion on what happened.
Firstly, none of us, especially me, said we were gonna do anything this year apart from learn, that is our goal, pure and simple.
But that in itself is not reason to justify a performance like we put on, now to get an idea of how we played on that first day, imagine a bunch of players, bad players, I mean really bad players all having a bad day...we were worse...a lot worse.
Teams beat us that normally wouldn't get a look in.
Now I have two options as a coach, to think that my team may well not be up to it, or alternatively, I might think that something is going on that is not indicative of their normal game.
Well, if we needed any reminding of just how good we can play, a win against the Ton Tons did the job.
The Ton Tons were kicking ass all over the place and were eventual losing finalists to Dynasty, so to beat them as we did, was a timely reminder.
But how the hell could we play so bad and not only let ourselves down but also all those back home who were supporting us ?
The answer wasn’t easy to come by but it lay in the relative inexperience of high end paintball we have in the side.
Remember, we only have Junior, Ledz and Jack as pros, the rest were ams and novices.
Our fragility was not in our technical ability, although that went straight out the window, it was in our mindset when dealing with the American teams.
Once we sorted it, we got back to our normal game and started winning again but it was too late to save a place in the semis and way too late to save face.
I think I have mentioned on here before something Ledzy said when we started out on this venture together, he said, 'We have to learn to lose first, before we can learn to win', no truer words were spoken.
I don't think any of us realised that we could lose that badly and hopefully learn that much.
In fact I would have preferred to have lost a lot less and consequently learnt a lot less than what we ended up doing.
We know those losses do not in any way reflect the talent base we have in the team, if we thought that, we would all give it up in a heartbeat believe me.
No, we all know what went wrong and we thankfully put it right in the end but it was ooohh sooo long in coming.
We had originally decided to do HB and then go to Portugal but this result has galvanised the team into an almost instant dismissal of skulking back to the Millennium with our tails between our legs, we are going to play Vegas and put right what we did wrong and get some self-respect back.
We have no excuses, only ourselves to blame, me included, we will work like **** to put it right for ourselves and our sponsors, make no mistake about that.
I spoke to Steve Duffy (Duffitusta), PGI's group ed about all this and he told me that 'perhaps it was a good thing we lost like that, it wil harden you and teach you a lesson' he told me, he went on to say, 'there were so much hype about you guys that if you had gone over and done quite well, your guys might have started to believe in it all'.
Perhaps there is some truth in what he says but it don't make it any easier to swallow I can tell ya.
To all the people who supported us, I will promise you, we will work to put it right.
Robbo
Firstly, none of us, especially me, said we were gonna do anything this year apart from learn, that is our goal, pure and simple.
But that in itself is not reason to justify a performance like we put on, now to get an idea of how we played on that first day, imagine a bunch of players, bad players, I mean really bad players all having a bad day...we were worse...a lot worse.
Teams beat us that normally wouldn't get a look in.
Now I have two options as a coach, to think that my team may well not be up to it, or alternatively, I might think that something is going on that is not indicative of their normal game.
Well, if we needed any reminding of just how good we can play, a win against the Ton Tons did the job.
The Ton Tons were kicking ass all over the place and were eventual losing finalists to Dynasty, so to beat them as we did, was a timely reminder.
But how the hell could we play so bad and not only let ourselves down but also all those back home who were supporting us ?
The answer wasn’t easy to come by but it lay in the relative inexperience of high end paintball we have in the side.
Remember, we only have Junior, Ledz and Jack as pros, the rest were ams and novices.
Our fragility was not in our technical ability, although that went straight out the window, it was in our mindset when dealing with the American teams.
Once we sorted it, we got back to our normal game and started winning again but it was too late to save a place in the semis and way too late to save face.
I think I have mentioned on here before something Ledzy said when we started out on this venture together, he said, 'We have to learn to lose first, before we can learn to win', no truer words were spoken.
I don't think any of us realised that we could lose that badly and hopefully learn that much.
In fact I would have preferred to have lost a lot less and consequently learnt a lot less than what we ended up doing.
We know those losses do not in any way reflect the talent base we have in the team, if we thought that, we would all give it up in a heartbeat believe me.
No, we all know what went wrong and we thankfully put it right in the end but it was ooohh sooo long in coming.
We had originally decided to do HB and then go to Portugal but this result has galvanised the team into an almost instant dismissal of skulking back to the Millennium with our tails between our legs, we are going to play Vegas and put right what we did wrong and get some self-respect back.
We have no excuses, only ourselves to blame, me included, we will work like **** to put it right for ourselves and our sponsors, make no mistake about that.
I spoke to Steve Duffy (Duffitusta), PGI's group ed about all this and he told me that 'perhaps it was a good thing we lost like that, it wil harden you and teach you a lesson' he told me, he went on to say, 'there were so much hype about you guys that if you had gone over and done quite well, your guys might have started to believe in it all'.
Perhaps there is some truth in what he says but it don't make it any easier to swallow I can tell ya.
To all the people who supported us, I will promise you, we will work to put it right.
Robbo
....
