In the early semifinal we were up against the German national champions Frizzly Bears (aka. Møg-Bjørne ;-) ) from Aachen. As usual our captain Daniel Ocariz won the flip and we started out in defence and broke it. A perfect start as our power handler Henrik Thomesen was on the sideline the whole match, due to a bad thigh from yesterdays last match. Jesper Bakkegaard was back on the field drugged on pills from his doc-bro. Thomas Alsted was still out because of his calve, which he injured in the second match of Friday.
And so 13 active players played this match. The absence of Henrik Thomesen led Carsten Hvenegaard in the first offence point to pull ze big forehand to Kristoffer Thomas Buus, receiving the disc in the endzone. We played our standard defence zone with great success, with the alternation of Lars Beck covering the Frizzly Bears’ number 13 Hansi constantly. But Frizzly bears picked up some great defence by switching to man-to-man defence. They came back to 7 – 6 after a two point lead to Ragnarok. But we had an extra joker up our sleeve, personalized by the backhand-Bakkegaard-express.
We took the match for halftime at 8 – 7 and starting in offence. After a layout block from our newly imported Nick Pannu in our zone we scored. Nick who by the way really played an tremendous tournament, quickly becoming a solid and stable rock in our handler-line. With the block we took a time-out being 3 points ahead, 11 – 8. We took our shit together and won 15 – 10, after a nice block by Christoffer Sværke on their frontline.
In the final we played 7 Schwaben whom we smashed the day before 15 – 6. We were determined not to let them have their revenge and not to relax on our defence and offence only because we were now qualified for EUCF. This determination combined with all Ragnarockers being extremely pumped- (on Vitamin I) and psyched up, really showed on the field. 7 Schwaben never controlled the game. One of the reasons were that we succeeded in marking their main handler/hucker No. 9, which really made it hard for them to play our defence, first our zone and then our man-to-man. In the end we could claim the victory with Mads Bakkegaard scoring his first and indeed beautiful Callahan, as the whole sideline were shouting “CAAAALLAAAHAAAAAN!”.
7 Schwaben only scored 5 points, mainly due to some pretty impressive hucks from No. 9. You couldn’t see on the team that it actually were missing three players, Henrik Thomesen, Thomas Alsted and I, who all were injured in some way or another.
Having missed different players in all of our matches and still being able to perform without regards to who we were missing, really shows what a team effort this was. I think mentally did we play an extremely good tournament, at no point did we drag ourselves down to the level of our opponents for a longer period of time, but stayed focused and played our game.
This is all for this now, I hope you have enjoyed the three recaps. Please leave a comment/like on our webpage and/or at our facebook channel! Peace out…
Btw.. check out our photos from Nürnberg on Flickr.
