Birmingham Open
Mar. 29th, 2016 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Before the need to move flat became quite so urgent I'd entered the Birmingham. And since my coach was running the Birmingham, it wasn't like I could un-enter (not to mention the £30 it cost and that it's probably my last chance to get points at the Birmingham for a while).
As the grown ups were down, it looked like they might put the kibosh on things but when I say something will take 2 days to pack up, I mean it will take 2 days so we were done with a couple of hours to spare.
So, after three days of sleeping on the floor and no fencing practise for two weeks, I get to the hall in time to clean my weapons (which I'd been banned from doing at home because of the mess) and then the pools get read out.
My pool has HB, PM, PNH and someone else good, plus me and an Irish girl I know. My exact comment was 'dear God, kill me now'. Thankfully, there is a pool redraw because someone made an oops. My real pool was much nicer. (HB vs PM ended up being the final, just to show you the problem with the first pool.)
Of course, my first match was against the best fencer in our pool, who will be referred to as Baby B, because I reffed her when she was an under-9. She beat me 5-1. I then won two matches, including against one person who insisted on fencing close to the box and hitting hard. I won by sneakiness. That match I'm actually proud of because I had to lure her away from the box so I wouldn't hit it instead of her. In her case I'm reasonably sure that she was doing it by accident, but I've noticed a tendency in women's foil of fencers moving to the sides of pistes to make it hard to hit them. I hates it!
Then I lost the remaining matches, including two 4-5 losses (both to people who train with people I used to train with). Bah!
Was 39th after the pools. Lost the match into the 32 to one of the people I lost 4-5 to in the pool. Most frustrating.
Due to some other pool wonkiness (v. good fencers coming back from injury so having a much lower ranking than they should, v. good foreign fencers with no GB ranking etc) lots of people broke into the 32, so I dropped from 39th to 44th. Points thankfully go down to 45th.
Can't complain too much. I screwed up one of the 4-5 losses, which might have given me a better draw in the last 64. Or it might not have done, see previous comment about the wonky pools.
Got points, which was one of my aims for this year because the Birmingham is normally a difficult competition, so I am relatively happy. Except for that 4-5.
As the grown ups were down, it looked like they might put the kibosh on things but when I say something will take 2 days to pack up, I mean it will take 2 days so we were done with a couple of hours to spare.
So, after three days of sleeping on the floor and no fencing practise for two weeks, I get to the hall in time to clean my weapons (which I'd been banned from doing at home because of the mess) and then the pools get read out.
My pool has HB, PM, PNH and someone else good, plus me and an Irish girl I know. My exact comment was 'dear God, kill me now'. Thankfully, there is a pool redraw because someone made an oops. My real pool was much nicer. (HB vs PM ended up being the final, just to show you the problem with the first pool.)
Of course, my first match was against the best fencer in our pool, who will be referred to as Baby B, because I reffed her when she was an under-9. She beat me 5-1. I then won two matches, including against one person who insisted on fencing close to the box and hitting hard. I won by sneakiness. That match I'm actually proud of because I had to lure her away from the box so I wouldn't hit it instead of her. In her case I'm reasonably sure that she was doing it by accident, but I've noticed a tendency in women's foil of fencers moving to the sides of pistes to make it hard to hit them. I hates it!
Then I lost the remaining matches, including two 4-5 losses (both to people who train with people I used to train with). Bah!
Was 39th after the pools. Lost the match into the 32 to one of the people I lost 4-5 to in the pool. Most frustrating.
Due to some other pool wonkiness (v. good fencers coming back from injury so having a much lower ranking than they should, v. good foreign fencers with no GB ranking etc) lots of people broke into the 32, so I dropped from 39th to 44th. Points thankfully go down to 45th.
Can't complain too much. I screwed up one of the 4-5 losses, which might have given me a better draw in the last 64. Or it might not have done, see previous comment about the wonky pools.
Got points, which was one of my aims for this year because the Birmingham is normally a difficult competition, so I am relatively happy. Except for that 4-5.
