What Went Down At: Windmill 2018

Editors: hazard/ali
Contributors: connormch (Ragnarok), hogi (Clapham), Nina (Chaos), DP (Isnogood), aido19 (Ranelagh), Axel (Glasgow), MJB (Reading), Dylan (SMOG)

Mixed Results (+Spirit)
1. GRUT
2. Salaspils FC
3. Hässliche Erdferkel
4. SeE6
5. Reading Ultimate
6. Team Radio Shower
7. Sasquidistus
8. Colorado Karlsruhe
--
11. Glasgow Ultimate
12. SMOG Ultimate

Open Results (+Spirit)
1. Clapham Ultimate
2. CUSB (La Fotta)
3. Ragnarok
4. Chevron Action Flash
5. Bad Skid
6. Freespeed
7. Ranelagh
8. FUJ
---
11. Isnogood

Women's Results (+Spirit)
1. Mainzelmädchen
2. Atletico
3. YAKA
4. Troubles
5. Gentleladies
6. Mantis
7. Flying Angels Berne - FABulous
8. Dublin Gravity
---
14. Chaos Ultimate

hazard

Welcome to the Windmill chat! This is going to be a very light/informal affair, with people inputting from all three divisions. We’ll also be very fluid with this one, rather than our usual more rigid structure. Let us know in the comments if you like it! Nothing else to add, let’s get going.

connormch

Okay quick thoughts from the weekend:

OPEN

- Based on a mix of performances, I think any of the top 4 could have come away with gold.

- Clapham O line were saved by the D line in the final.

- Though there were a lot of WUCC teams, I don't think we saw a complete representation with a few stronger teams missing key players (Bad Skid, Freespeed).

MIXED

- GRUT are good, but not unbeatable (well done Reading).

- Correct me if I'm wrong but WUCC teams dominated the overall results as expected.

- Huge number of mixed teams with a large ability range led to some spice with Swiss draw (SMOG finishing 1st seed after day 1 but then finishing outside the top 8).

Very sorry I know almost nothing about the Women's Division from this weekend.

hazard

I was really impressed by Ragnarok actually.

hogi

I have lots of thoughts too because I played little to none after Game 2.

Nina

What happened Hogi?.

hogi

Similar to my long term injury last year, I ran into the back of someone in an attempt to sky them (hadn’t set to jump yet) and walloped my knee on the ground when I tripped. Physio at Windmill said it felt like a meniscus issue which is music to my ears.

connormch

Having played against the other three teams in the top 4, I genuinely believe all of us could have taken the gold. Both our games against Chevron went to sudden death and both could have easily gone either way. Luckily for us it resulted in a bronze. They are looking strong and unified ahead of WUCC.

Our game against CUSB in Swiss play was intense to say the least. 9-5 down to 14-11 to a 15-14 sudden death loss which we definitely could have won. They were strong but did seem a little disjointed at times, possibly the addition of a few pickups? Our semi against Clapham was probably our weakest performance of the weekend and still only lost by three. Our D line got two breaks and threw away chances to get more. CU's defence won them the game, but again, not unbeatable. Rich (Harris), Tom (Anthony) and I had a blast and feel like we made a real impact on the D line. Each of us got a few goals and some tasty blocks

Also CU losing to CUSB in Swiss play and CUSB losing in the final lends itself to how strong the top 4 really were.

hogi

The main difference between CU vs CUSB on Friday and CU vs CUSB on Sunday was fitness. CUSB’s O line were gassed and lost them the game. The CU D line struggled a little in our end zone set but otherwise outran CUSB all game.

DP

CU were always going to win second time round.

aido19

You had a close call in the quarters too.

connormch

You think DP? They really did their best to throw it away. Also apologies Aidan. Ranelagh also gave us a really close game which made have just come down to a dropped pull. But they certainly could have competed in the semis.

DP

Yeah like hogi says fitness let CUSB down and we all know about playing a team twice. CUSB didn't have a plan B, and they showed CU that in the first game. Clapham have always been a second half team who adapt better than their counterparts. That's exactly what happened. D line worked their sh*t out and played through their fitter and well organised systems.

Clapham just about managed to rise to the top of the back this weekend
Photo by Arnold B. of BlackFlamingo Photography on the Windmill Facebook page

DP
Women's final was not great. Atlético are so much better a team than they showed and gave the game to Mainzelmädchen who took exactly what was given.

hazard

My personal opinion was that Mainzelmädchen’s zone was really effective, but their offence really wasn't.

connormch

That's fair.

DP

But again any in top 4 could have won really. YAKA had a great comeback against Mantis in quarters (14-11 down to win in universe) and their pickups were really well integrated.

hazard

YAKA kept having epic sudden-death games on the pitch we were supposed to be playing on next. It started to feel personal after a while.

Nina

Adding on about the Women’s final, there were a lot of (uncharacteristic??) execution errors by Mainzelmädchen - lots of drops and a couple of throwaways. Atlético could have capitalized on these a bit more. Also I think I counted something like 6/7 turnovers in the first point.

hazard

Statto just released a breakdown of the Open final. I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of the Women's final too, all the finals seemed to have very different characters.

hogi

The Women’s final was unfortunately a turn fest.

DP

Atlético are the better team player to player but didn't execute. And Mainz have two stars that capitalised but also made too many mistakes. Made for a tight and turn heavy game.

hogi

OPEN

Where I’ll chat the most because I saw the most of this Div…

Clapham: Didn’t play anyone outside the top 9. Think we could have beaten Freezzz Beezzz by more but it was peak wind on Friday. Having a non-playing coach (Jamie Cross) is so valuable. O line will be damned for their first half final performance but they played slickly for the vast majority of the tournament. D line... I mean, it’s the same for any team, maybe most evident with CU, but you win games on D. To put into perspective the depth of the squad, we were missing 7 of our Worlds squad from the final and had another less than 100% guy who played through and got goals and Ds.

CUSB: Seemingly have 7 pickups (either regular pickups or new). 2 Boston guys, 2 Furious George guys, 2 Austrians and Nas M’Bae Vogel (not at Windmill). Tired legs on Sunday was perhaps coupled with a lack of chemistry and that was their undoing. Some big players had poor games by their standard which didn’t help.

Freespeed: One of the most gung-ho men’s teams, they live and die by their sword as they had too many huck and hammer turnovers to trouble Clapham too much. Highlight of the game was me getting somewhat stuck on some scaffolding because I couldn’t use my left leg to stand on the ladder. It gave great enjoyment to all in the Spirit circle…

Freezzz Beezzz: Lack depth. PJ is a bit of a one man show at times. Give them a few years and if they all stay around, they have some good youth looking to burst through.

Bad Skid: Missed Holger massively. Nico Müller is one of the best handlers in European and one of the fastest players. His closing speed is insane.

Ragnarok: Their game vs CU was the most boring game of the weekend for me. Pretty much 90 mins of zone O.

MIXED

Sesquidistus: They are like CU in that they are very good at digging themselves out of holes. Really athletic bunch. Lead by a few French national team guys, namely Gael Ancelin, and some speedy women. I like their calculated gung-ho style (not to be confused with GRUT’s uncalculated, trust-your-receiver style). Saw them vs. Glasgow and thought despite their women's athleticism that Katie Flight was great and was largely always free but actually didn’t see much disc which was :(

Reading: I very much so enjoy their O line’s tendency to pair Gunbie’s hucks and Godbold’s breaks with speedy women in isolation. It’s exciting but also seemingly low risk. I wondered if Amelia Kenneth was injured this weekend as I didn’t see her play as well as usual and I thought I’d see her more in some of the dogfights Reading had. Delighted to see Reading beat GRUT. As good a segue as any into…

GRUT: I said at the end of last year that GRUT are going to get found out this year. Their gung-ho, trust-your-receiver style does actually make a lot of sense when you have Floor going deep (she’s insane). It obviously didn’t get them a win vs Reading though and it shouldn’t have got them a win in the final. That game should have been over at half time; it was Salaspils' to lose and they choked. Side note - thought Ben Oort had a very quiet final from what I saw. He seemed to just be clearing space for the most part after he was D’d in the first point. Disappointing as he’s been tearing it up in the AUDL this year.

Salaspils: They had a couple of brilliant female defenders who were laying out and contesting Floor in the air. I think they were unlucky to not get more blocks tbh. The guy who D’d Oort in point 1 went quiet I thought; which could have hurt them. Largely, they just didn’t have a plan B…

Wished I could have seen more of Erdferkel and Colorado, but what I did see is that one of the Colorado handlers (number thirty something) has insane acceleration for a big dude. He wasn't big in terms of chunky/fat but rather he was tall and stocky as hell. He moves so quick on the throw and go.

WOMEN'S
All games were on at the same time as Open so missed all but the (disappointing) final. Shout out to Gravity for being the only team in the top 8 who aren’t going to Worlds.

hogi

Edit to my piece on pulling above; I don’t think Ragnarok did break CU after all. But their excellent pulls made it a case of having to go 90-95m for a goal instead of 65-70.

connormch

I'm fairly sure we broke twice at least. Both in the upwind endzone (right of your screen hogi).

hogi

Hmm. You definitely did actually. Woops! Dunno why I thought they were D points.

hazard

As a heads up - we had two Godbolds this weekend (Ania and Dan). Dan was our only non-WUCC player this weekend and came to boost numbers, avoid injury, and bring up the average age of the team. I'll assume hogi was talking about Ania. Dan will be there as a Game Advisor though!

As for GRUT - they're very good. Currently I feel the only way to beat them is outsmart them, because out-throwing and out-running them is very difficult. Given they're one of the few teams with a coach, and that they're only growing in experience, out-thinking them will only become harder. They may have been found out slightly, but what we've found is still a very good team.

Albeit one that is (currently) beatable.

Reading were the only team able to break GRUT this weekend
Photo by Marusa Lesnik on the Windmill Facebook page

Axel

Never been to Windmill before but Mixed seemed to have a lot of depth. Just thinking about Glasgow's results, we beat teams who lost to teams who beat us. We ended up in more fights than we should have. Missed out on quarters by 0.1 Swiss points and lost to Salaspils by 2 in a game we felt we could have won (D line got lots of blocks but conversion rate was low). Would have loved to play Colorado or GRUT. Though no idea what all the hype and love for GRUT is. As hogi says, their game is just crazy.

MJB

Reading had a good weekend and we had a lot of fun. However, we had a bunch of games where our O didn't come out firing and we dug ourselves a hole that we had to get out of in the second half.

It was interesting to see different teams' responses and solutions to our gruelling zone and help defences, which we usually relied on to grind back those points. We were missing a lot of our offensive cadre so hopefully we’ve left that problem in the Netherlands. We’ll see. It was also very encouraging to see some teams we saw last year using their whole team a lot more this time around, rather than just quarterbacking with their guys. I think the European scene is very sensitive to this which is great! (As evidenced by the jeers and cheers at passing choices towards the start of the Mixed final.)

As Axel said, the Mixed division was hugely close with a lot of teams-beating-teams-that-beat-other-teams. Is this a by-product of Swiss draw and the glorious algorithm? Probably. Is it also a sign that European Mixed is a big strategic rock-paper-scissors? Possibly. Great to see all the British teams finish fairly high, with just a few results here and there that didn’t go their way; keeping our Division nice and strong back home.

I’m also very pleased to see Reading continuing our tradition of ending one big win-streak a year..

hogi

General question - what do people make of the Swiss draw? Do you like it? I’m personally a fan but I heard a lot of people somewhat scathingly commenting on it this weekend. Keen to hear thoughts.

connormch

It punishes in games where people relax and don't finish it strong which I like. Takes away the "win is a win" and "loss is a loss" attitude.

Axel

I didn't watch enough games to have that many opinions across divisions so I probably can't add much that hasn't been said and I don't want to give our amazing secrets away on how to miss out on top 8 by fractions.

But on Swiss draw, I think it's great, other than one game (probably) you will play teams your strength all weekend, giving great match ups. It's always nice to go into brackets. I would have loved to play a 9-16 one for sure and not keep going Swiss as that motivates me personally, and old results can't come to bite you in the end game. But for getting teams seeded and for choosing good match ups it's awesome. I also think they kept teams from the same country from playing each other which is great.

MJB

And who doesn’t enjoy the schadenfreude when you see a team get a win and still drop down.

hogi

You’re heartless, Matt!

Dylan

SMOG had a great start getting to the top of the Swiss rankings early on by winning our first two games very comfortably. We were them humbled by Colorado who very successfully avenged the match-up from Euros. We had a bit of a capitulation against their zone and this hiding pretty much excluded us from top 8 unless we managed to put up some very big scores in our next two games.

On Sunday our D line really struggled against Shenanigans' all-star O-line leading to another loss. We then had a pretty comfortable game against UAE slightly overshadowed by a controversial dangerous play where one of their women got a layout D on Callum but completely blindsided him and if she weighed 20kg more would have almost certainly broken his leg. Some UAE stood up for her, but it does bring up some gender equity issues as I am certain of the genders were reversed it would have been treated very differently.... Admin (another USA pickup team) were a great team to play and get used to some of the crazy athleticism that we are going to see in Cincinnati.

Getting to play Mubidisc was a bit of an interesting one as we are in the same pool at Worlds so neither team wanted to reveal their hand too much. It was a really fun game and even though we came away with the win I expect that it will be a very different game come July. Our last game was pretty much just a half as a player had dislocated her shoulder at the end of the previous game and it took around half an hour for an ambulance to come and treat her.

We are a bit gutted that we couldn't play any more top 8 teams as we think we could have given them a great game. I think if SMOG vs GRUT finally happens it will quite a spectacle as both are young teams with a similar style reliant on a deep game played through both genders and of course neither really likes to be made to think too much.

hogi

SMOG vs GRUT would be fun!! I’d enjoy seeing Floor Kelurtz vs Tessa and TB & Mazz vs Oort & Jansen. Only thing of SMOG I really saw this weekend was one of their women with a cannon in the longest pull comp.

connormch

Rachel Turton used to pull for GB women back in 2015/2016. Absolute cannon.

Only other questions from me; asking you to harness your inner Sean Colfer, it’s time for ludicrous predictions:
1 - Which European team will finish highest in each division?
2 - Which of the UK teams will finish highest in their respective divisions?
3 - Who is going to win the World Cup?

Dylan

1. Clapham, Atlético, Reading/GRUT 

2. Clapham, Iceni, Reading 

3. England ofc

Nina

1. Atlético, GRUT, Clapham. 

2. Clapham, Reading, Iceni 

3. It’s not coming home. Spain.

Chaos headed over to Windmill to continue our theme of the season - development and establishing the squad for future years. Played some very well-drilled and athletic Worlds teams, got in some wins (2) against our first international opposition. I think it was quite a valuable experience for the squad to play opposition that is punishing - we found new gears on D which we are keen to bring to Tour 3. Came second in Spirit too!

Also wanted to comment something about the women’s final which I am unsure anyone else has said so far - I found it sad and frustrating that the disc throwing into Herbie's bike cart occurred during the half-time, whilst the women were waiting on the line to play. It seemed to be a bit of a momentum killer and delayed start of play for two obviously ready sides during an important moment in their Worlds prep.

connormch

I'd agree with that. Should almost certainly be done between games

Nina

Not sure if anyone complained but I’m not sure the same scenario would have flown if e.g. during the Open final half-time.

MJB

They hit the half-time cap right?

hazard

There was the pulling competition at half-time for the Mixed final, and nothing for the Open final as far as I am aware.
I also really enjoy Swiss. Particularly as a warm-up tournament where you want to play as many high-level teams as possible, I say #allhailthealgorithm. I would agree with Axel about a 9-16 bracket at the end though, to add some spice to proceedings.

Dylan

My problem with Swiss, especially at a "fun" (or warm-up) tournament is that it punishes teams that don't obliterate opponents. There isn't much room to play around with tactics as every point matters. It can mean that mismatched early games are just crap for everyone because the better team have to be ruthless.

Also, practically, some teams just play in a style that leads to close games. This doesn't mean that they aren't far better than the opponents, just maybe that they play a more efficient game, less reliant on breaks.

hogi

Re: The Herbie basket thing - that’s a Windmill tradition to occur at half time in the middle final. The teams must not have been briefed on it, but it always happens. Same with the pull comp for final three.

If the teams were briefed they wouldn’t have stood on the line. That’s what made it look like an issue, and this year, I think they could have binned it when teams were ready. But yeah... tradition.

Nina

I think Swiss suited us as we played some close games through the tourney which was what we wanted and what would help us develop, but I can understand how it’s annoying when you win all your games and seed 18th after a day.

Axel

1) Clapham, Atlético (all hail Finland), Black Eagles 

2) Clapham, Iceni, Eagles 

3) Brazil 

*actually Glasgow to be highest. Why not call it now?

Dylan

I thought you'd back Scotland, Axel?

Axel

For which one?

Dylan

I meant World Cup, but I remember now.

Axel

I'm not even from there! Also have you seen the state of Scottish football. May as well back Finland... and we've never qualified.

MJB

1 - Clapham, Atlético (go Kat!), GRUT

2 - Clapham, Iceni, Reading*

3 - Spain

*At the risk of seeing mean messages on the Bleagles snapchat, I think Reading may be bringing more stuff that the international teams may not have encountered. Maybe more of a CUlt than a Bear Cav? :3

Axel

Want to expand on that? Sounds fun and interesting.

MJB

I think that as a team we have invested pretty heavily in frisbee smarts and have got good at tweaking and making up new defences and offences to deal with teams depending on what they’re bringing. It definitely lets us hang with teams that we are not near athletically, particularly when we play Open, and concomitantly allows us to bring up more scrubs to play because we’re not entirely matching 1-1. We usually lean more on it in Open because our women are ballers. Maybe one day we'll try being fit and smart.

hazard

Mate. Sounds like effort. Let's just keep riding this wave until people notice.

hogi

ima be ballsy

1) Clapham, YAKA, Reading

2) Clapham, Nice Bristols, Reading

3) Croatia

Main reason I think Bristol might do best is Iceni have a really short squad in terms of numbers. Happy to be proven wrong and for Iceni to outperform themselves. I think there’s a lot of pressure on Iceni to do best from the UK but they’d do well to ignore that and focus on themselves/the process.

Reading as doing better than GRUT - Reading Mixed seem to step up and perform when it matters and have good depth. GRUT are gunslingers and I struggle to believe it will hold up vs the top teams at Worlds.

YAKA were profesh in their Tom’s final performance. Sounds like they barely missed out on Windmill’s final too. They’re in form and have the stars to make stuff happen.

The Croats are going about their business well. One of two teams with max points in the group with the only other nations being able to max out being England-Belgium should it not end in a draw. Personally I’m rooting for Lukaku and Hazard to run riot.

connormch

Clapham, Atlético, Reading 

Clapham, Bristols, Reading 

Brazilia all the way.

Iceni/Bristols was a coin flip for me. Bristols' big squad and in form vs Iceni’s US experience.

hazard

I’m going to finish off because I get to do that as editor. Just to say it was my first time at Windmill, and I absolutely loved it. It was a really fun, high level tournament. I learnt loads, and had a lot of fun too. I know some people reading this will have been many times before, but for those in a position to, I’d really recommend trying to get a team there (or picking up for someone) if you get the chance. One thing I think we miss in the UK is a high level tournament which is also a lot of fun. But that’s a chat for another time.