Winter League Sunday 16th Jan

Post date: Jan 21, 2011 12:00:56 PM

On Sunday Clapham entered 2 teams into London Winter League for the first time this preseason. With only two games for each team we mixed it up a bit to enable more people to play, see more of the new faces and have a couple more subs for each team.

Conditions were fairly windy, with an up wind/down wind and very muddy under foot. We had a few new faces trying out playing for us also.

The conditions made it quite difficult – up wind hucks tended to hang or tail off and down wind they zipped by pretty fast. We got the hang of the wind quite early though and had a nice looking deep game. Although when the disc hung it allowed a lot of players to get underneath it. I think OB caught about 5 just by following the play and backing it up when the disc had floated over about 4/5 players misread.

We played Burro 2, Fire 2, Brighton and Burro 1 in that order. The two Burro games were pretty similar in that we went up a few early but seemed to lose focus and concentration in the middle part of the game that let them get a few more on the board than they should have done. But both games were put to bed pretty early.

Fire was a different proposition. Like us it looked as though they had two equally split teams. We started slowly and they went up by 2 or 3 to begin with. When we finally switched on we began to play some proper D and shut them down a lot better. By shutting their handlers down and taking away their IO breaks it made their resets harder and cut down their options due to their downfield cutters being well covered.

On O we began to work on some plays. Obviously with new players and not a lot of time it’s hard to integrate and work on everything in our play book but the new players adapted well and we began to get a bit more flow in our offence. Quick transitions also helped us get the disc moving early and score a couple of quick D points in almost all the games.

The final and closest game of the day was against Brighton. Again their deep game and hammers allowed them to score more than we would have liked but in the end we got the important blocks and managed to punch them in.

A couple of things to mention are the spirit we showed in really grinding out some of the longer more turnover high points, which was especially difficult in the conditions. When we introduced some of our principles and plays they seemed tow work well. At times we moved the disc up the pitch and from side to side quickly and well, not allowing the D to really set against us and our hucks really came off when we were hucking to cuts coming from the opposite side of the pitch.

On the other hand it was noticeable that we have a lot to work on. At times when the disc moved up field we stayed back too much and didn’t move up with the play, instead hanging behind the disc and stagnating our O and resets a bit. In the endzone we didn’t get enough continuation cuts from the back of the stack and also this occurred sometimes in open play too. Also we failed to keep the width when playing within our 3/4 structure. I think this may have been mainly due to the wind and the fact teams were able to use it as a eighth defender but we really need to make sure the cutters in positions 1 and 2 keep the width of the field. At times it felt like we were only playing in two thirds of the field space because of this.

Our D was good when we played tight man and stayed close to our players, denying them any separation, however we tended to switch off at times. We’ll blame this on the long day. Also I think we can blame most of our turns on a lack of match practice and rustiness.

One last thing to mention is fitness. We struggled as the day went on and as we got tired. Obviously it’s early in the season but fitness is an individual responsibility and we really need to start ramping up our workouts now so that we can hit the season proper and our first full training weekend running.

All in all a good day with a 4 – 0 win record. There will be a poll out later about the next winter league in February.