TW3

Well, this really was the week that was. Last weekend, I managed to juggle two separate visitors to Oxford, despite them turning up at more-or-less the same time, and the later one coming on about 12 hours' notice (hi George!).

Wednesday saw me in a state of nervous tension all day, looking forward to the final of the Oxford colleges ultimate frisbee spring league. We were quite chuffed to get that far, and the opposition were looking good. To keep things interesting, I had a tutorial immediately before the match, which ended up being relocated about five times that afternoon, and then resulted in my finding out how little I know about atomic physics (with exams in six weeks. Argh!). Still, it was a good way to get fired up for a match in which we knew we needed to play hard to have any chance of winning.

Losing a player to a sprained ankle in the warm-up probably isn't the best way to start when your team has about 10 people on the squad and theirs has nearer 20, but that's the inauspicious way we began our bid for victory. It could only get better :-).

So, to the game. This must have been the closest and most hard-fought game of Oxford college ultimate that I've ever seen. For every point we scored, they responded. We had all the clichés, straight from a Hollywood sports film: neck-and-neck in points all the way, big catches, big defence plays saving us from conceding points, celebrations, and to top it off, the match went to sudden death. One point to determine the champion

And I scored it!! Woohoo! It's such a weird feeling watching an incoming disc, and thinking "If I catch this, we have celebrations, and if I drop it, everyone comes over and kicks me." So I caught it, and I've been on a high since. :-).

The rest of the photos are online too, if you're interested in that sort of thing.)


To top it off, it wasn't just a great game in terms of competitiveness: it had great 'spirit' too. Playing in such a close game that's self-referreed, and having almost zero arguments can only make one feel good about the world. And of course, after the match, we had the requisite silly games (known as "calls") and went out with our opponents, and most of the sizeable crowd who had cheered us on, for a drink.

Ah, good days. And that's to say nothing about my birthday yesterday...