PALS Singapore 2015

I'm pretty mad about PALS Singapore because we started playing great on Saturday, but played like amateurs on the Friday. With only the top 4 going through straight to the semi-finals, screwing up Friday sent us home. Other than that, this event was really spectacular. The field is one of the best I've ever been too. A perfectly flat AstroTurf playing surface and an expertly organised event. Well done to the PALS Singapore team!

Friday, we played Aisawan, Xtioneers and Demonic. We started off OK against Aisawan, lost a 7 and a half minute point and couldn't get it back in the remaining time. We had some things against us, like people borrowing our guns before we left Perth and breaking them on the eve of the event. That's a nice way to go into an event. And we shot the bounciest paint known to man. It was a fair loss to Aisawan though, some things didn't go our way, they played well and I could deal with it and was ready to move on with the rest of the games. Next we played Xtioneers. It was a close game but I didn't feel like we weren't in control. Then we started getting penalties. We essentially won the point to put us at 3-2, but got a penalty right at the end and voided the point. We finished with a tie. And then we played Demonic -- they had the Asian version of Dave Baines shooting me on the break every point. And it wasn't just a couple of balls landing, I was arriving to my bunker covered in his paint. It was some really good breakshooting. From the pits for most of the game, I'd watch the game get to 4vs4, feel hopeful and then watch us die out of our spots, leaving us with another loss.

We weren't playing as a team, people weren't being smart on the field and we weren't adjusting to the other teams. We weren't talking to each other off the field about it. It was pretty hopeless. There was some shouting and then we went back to the hotel.

On Friday night I texted Stevie and Devon from bed and said what the game plan was going to be. I normally hate doing this, I want everyone's input. But it just wasn't working and I thought we still had a slim chance to make it through if we could win all three of our games on Saturday. I woke up pretty jacked at 4:30am, ready to do whatever it would take to keep us in the tournament.

First in the morning we had to verse Infernal. I briefed the team on the changes to the game plan. We quickly went down 0-3, with getting a penalty on the third point. I wasn't too happy about that and may have lost my mind for a minute in the pit. I wanted to preserve whatever slim chance we had of making it into the top 4. I remember feeling a huge sense of "going for it" as we played the next 3 points as hard as we could, being as aggressive as possible and sprinting the buzzer in to preserve the clock. We managed to get the score back to 3-3, but were unable to win the final point, leaving us with a draw. It was a nice feeling for us to finally be playing good -- it took some shouting and a lot of frustration, but we arrived. Too bad it was much too late.

We won our next 2 games. This left us with 3 points total from the prelims, we needed at least 4 to be in with a shot at the top 4. So we didn't make Sunday.

We did the same thing in Thailand but squeaked through and won. But it's not sustainable, we need to look at how we prepare for the events.

Now the long wait till World Cup Asia.