It’s currently 8pm in Prague and I’m sitting outside a bar at the Strahov dorms. The weather has cooled down somewhat and a nice breeze has been rolling through. Day 1 of WUCC 2010 is over (for the best part) and the hundreds of players staying here are settling in. To the bars, that is.

Having played two games in the heat myself, I’m a bit amiss to try and recall details of matches we lost and those I sort of caught parts of, so for now I’ll share some general thoughts on the tournament.

The Venue

Prague is a nice city. What I’ve seen from bus rides, anyway. However rolling into the Stadion Strahov area you are indeed reminded that this place once was a communist stronghold. Not a bad thing by any means, but listen to the players joke about how their student dorms resemble detention cells or a mental asylum, and it’s pretty clear that it’s not the 3-star hotels we’re used to on the road.

What is notable is Stadion Srahov – Czech for “Strahov Stadium”. Imagine a soccer stadium. Now imagine instead of one pitch, there’s room for nine soccer pitches. Plus stands that can fit somewhere in the order of 200,000 people. Although there’s more vegetation than spectators up there these days. Enough negativity. The fields are flat and green, which is all you can ask for, really.

That’s the Strahov area. The other area – Vrsovice – is a 20 minute bus ride away and seems to contain all the fun stuff, but a little less of a tournament atmosphere since all the fields are long walks apart.

The Uniforms

This sport contains a lot of non-conventional uniform designs. Sure there are a bunch of league teams that have a standard colour/logo/number setup, but some of the design efforts on the jerseys here are incredible. All manner of colours can be seen – right now I can see green, purple, yellow and orange team jerseys being worn. Five Ultimate are responsible for a lot of them, with elaborate subliminated designs being the order of the week. My favourite so far – Sin City (Singapore). I’ll see if I can get a photo at some point.

That’s nice but who is playing?

Redbacks faced Ragnarok and Chevron Action Flash today. Ragnarok played us very smart. They spent the first few points taking each and every deep shot they could, and a lot of them stuck. So we concentrated on the long cuts. So they starting getting open under all the time. Schoolboy stuff, really. Chevron fell for my “make outlandish statements and get more blog hits” trap but they moved the disc very well, with about 80-90% of their throws happening within about 2-3 seconds of a catch. Chevron and Ragnarok face off tomorrow for top of the pool.

Wildcard took care of Brilliance in their game. I caught the second half, and in the sunny still conditions hucks were the throw of choice. Brilliance were trying to counter on their O with hucks as well but simply couldn’t get them to stick.

The only other game I had a chance to actually spectate was Pie Wagon versus Talinn Frisbee Club (Estonia), aka Sexy Legs. Pie Wagon went within two points of Mental Toss Flycoons earlier in the day, but Estonia got the jump on them. The windy conditions at field 30 (on top of a hill) made things tricky, and I think the artificial turf made the Newcastle players think twice about laying out for getable discs on O and D. After about 7-5 TFC’s way, Pie Wagon started to step up and play through their stars such as Jon Tatham and Clare Hussey and were playing better.

What’s on tomorrow?

Only one game for the Redbacks so plenty of spectating is on the cards. Redbacks play Absolut at 10:30am, Heads of State versus Sockeye at 12:30pm, Eastern Greys play at 2:30pm and the Chad Larson Experience vs Jeremy Codhand showcase game at 6:30pm. Right here I’ll throw in a cheap plug for my Twitter feed, where I’ll be on the sideline for those games.

The first thing you’ve got to know about Worlds is that it is extremely HUGE!
We came to Prague on Friday and saw billboards! advertising WUCC with a photo of layout by Iceni player. There were a lot of volunteers in those sweet yellow jerseys which were able to show us the way to check-in, and at the old town you could see teams enjoying the beautiful city.

On Saturday the big thing (beside the 4:0 score of Germany vs Argentina football game) was Sockeye’s throwing training. Ben, Idaho and many other Sockeye players were running quite unusual drills. It was a great opportunity to get some useful tips.

Sunday .. “Any given Sunday”. This is it. We woke up at 5:30 to get at the fields at 7:30. First game against Chaos from Canada..the team seeded #4. We are seeded #29. The game was intense and 30 degree weather too. There was no wind or even small breeze at all. We felt every point in our legs. The ‘first game’ mistakes gave our opponents the 3:0 lead. We got on the board with Wojtek’s #2 two handed layout catch from a huck of our D line. We traded some points but Canadians took off with a few more, and took half with 9:4 (i guess). In the second half Chaos got some smooth offences isolating the middle of the field with the split stack. We answered with a preety backhand huck from Lucjan #00 to Smok #11…but it was not enough. We lost 6:17. The game was very Spirited and we enjoyed it very much. We received some MVP gifts and had some nice chats – thanks guys. It was our first appearance at this kind of event and scoring 6 points against team seeded #4 is quite ok.

Second game against Frizzly Bears seeded #13. They used their wide pivots to break our marks and that was the reason we lost many points. The wind appeared which made our longer passes floaty. They took half 5:9. In this game we had to play small ball, and this was working much better. With some nice give and go movements we scored twice. In the last minutes we had three injuries in both teams, and I hope everything is fine. We lost 8:17. Our opponents gave us a badge as a gift-they got a nice logo.

That’s it for today. I’m going to watch The Game of the Day – Czech Hot Beaches vs Storm from Canada.

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