It was an up-and-down kind of weekend for the London Avengers - and there were times over the two days when you wouldn’t have put a 2p piece on their chances of making the Final at the Co-ed Slowpitch "C" Nationals, let alone winning the tournament. But it all came good in the end for a determined team just one year removed from being a London Ad League Rookie squad. With an assured performance in a Final that had once seemed out of reach, the Avengers came from behind with a six-run outburst in the fifth inning to take the title of 2004 C Nationals Champions, defeating a strong Oxford Angels team by a score of 15-11. The tournament was played on the weekend of September 11-12 at Royal Holloway College in Egham, Surrey, and was contested, sadly, by just 10 teams, the lowest entry since C Nationals began. The BSF will need to look more closely at why this happened. But for relaxed, good spirited and high quality Softball that often transcended the label of "recreational", this was an outstanding tournament, and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone who took part.
HIGHS AND LOWS
In fact, the C Nationals turned out to be a tournament where results were far from predictable, and where a number of teams experienced highs and lows. For Brighton Beachcombers from the Solent League, there was the high of winning all four games on Saturday to top Pool B, followed by the low of a quarter-final loss first thing on Sunday to the Avengers. For the Swingers from Nottingham University and the East Midlands League, there was the low of winning just a single group game on Saturday and then getting crushed 30-14 by Oxford Angels on Sunday morning - followed by the high of successive upsets over the Thames Valley Marlins and Brighton Beachcombers on Sunday afternoon to emerge as Plate Winners. Oxford Harriers suffered the ups and downs of a lose-one, win-one Saturday that left them with a 2-2 mark and third place in Pool B, but they advanced to the quarter-finals with a forfeit win over the Rookies on Sunday morning. Things were looking up - except that the Ascot Blues were waiting to give them a 19-3 spanking and condemn them to the Plate, where they then forfeited their last two games after losing two players to injuries. The Thames Valley Marlins lost a 7-6 squeaker to the Beachcombers in their first game on Saturday, then ripped off three straight wins to finish second in Pool B and set up what should have been a straightforward quarterfinal against the Shafters from Portsmouth University. But the Shafters, who struggled on Saturday, had already played and won a game on Sunday morning just to get to the quarter-final, and they used that momentum to turn the Marlins over by 11-6 and were just 13-12 down to the Oxford Angels after four innings in their semi-final - at which point the roof fell in. For the strong and confident Ascot Blues from Windsor, it was the high road all the way - until they fell off the precipice. Saturday gave them three easy wins - including one over the Avengers - and they started Sunday by mauling the Oxford Harriers in their quarter-final. The Blues then held a 12-7 lead in the semi-final as their opponents, the Avengers once again, came up in the last of the seventh. At that point, it wasn’t just the roof that fell in, but the whole house! More of this below... The only two teams that failed to find any highs to match their lows were the Ad League Rookies and the London Diamonds, both of whom lost all four pool games on Saturday. On Sunday, the Rookies were a player short (thanks to British Rail), and forfeited all their games while playing friendlies instead. The Diamonds kept on playing and losing, with two more losses on Sunday to run their record to 0-6 before taking a forfeit from the Rookies at the end of the day to record a single win and finish in ninth place. But no one matched the ups and downs of the Avengers. There was an initial high point on Saturday when they met the Oxford Angels in a pool game and crushed them by 26-7, the only defeat suffered by the Angels all day. Going into the last game on Saturday, the Avengers just needed a win to oust the Angels at the top of the group. But they ran into the tough Ascot Blues, and an 11-5 loss sent them all the way down to fourth place. And that meant an early morning quarter-final against the unbeaten Beachcombers on Sunday, a test that the Avengers eventually passed, though it wasn’t easy. That brought them back up against the Ascot Blues in the semi-finals, and when they trailed 12-7 coming up for their last at-bat, the Final seemed very far away indeed. But Softball is a funny game, and the Fat Lady, as someone remarked over the weekend, was very far from singing... |
