Maddog Through the Smog: Days 3 and 4

Day 3
Fitbit steps: 20,502 (8.4 miles)
Team fun fact learned: Claire’s real name is Anna
Results: USA 11 – Great Britain 10, USA 13, Currier Island 3

The weather forecast on TV has confirmed that the haziness you’ve been seeing in photos is indeed dust/sand and not smog. It’s staying pretty high up in the air, but I’m still thankful I don’t have asthma.

Great Britain was our first game and what a game it was. Really close all the way, the cap went on at 9-8 USA, game to 11. We broke the next point to go up 10-8, but GB didn’t back down. They scored their O point, and then broke us to tie it up and force double game. We then had a no-turn O point to win.

Team GB singing a ukulele song after the game

Currier Island was a really fun team to meet and play. The women on the team represent 10 different countries! Mercy Mbago from Kenya was on this team. So great to see her representing here in Dubai after Team Kenya’s fundraising effort to get her there. Can’t wait to see how she affects the ultimate game back home.

USA after the game against Currier Island

Until this evening, we hadn’t had a lot of down time. Between team dinners cooked at our apartments and walking back and forth between the fields, we haven’t had a lot of time to explore anything outside of the touristy JBR district. I joined the Women’s Masters team the night before to go up the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. This evening, though, we all took cabs to old town and wandered the markets. The men were all accosted by watch salesmen while the women were offered scarves and gold.

Little water boat taxis took us to the other side of the river where we had reservations for dinner with the US mean’s team at a cultural appreciation center. The dinner itself was fantastic and the accompanying AMA session with the host was very informative. The idea was that people could ask any questions without worrying about offending anyone. Unfortunately, another host joined and the session slowly dissolved into unrelated lectures. Since we had the early round, we couldn’t stick around to the end.

Dinner and the “AMA” session

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Day 4
Fitbit steps: 16,333 (6.7 miles)
Team fun fact learned: Claudia has never attended a wedding.
Results: USA 11 – Russia 9

Today we celebrated Kristin Franke’s birthday!

I love playing against Russian teams. They are speedy on the sand, tall, physical, and love to throw pinpoint around break hucks. They forced us to have to game plan on defense and challenged us to complete throws in tight windows. Like I told them (in Russian!) in the spirit circle after the game, their reputation of bad spirit preceded them, but in our game they proved the rumors wrong. It was a pleasure to play them.

This brings up some interesting questions about spirit scores and how we (teams) score each other based on expectation. We came into this game anticipating a certain style of play and were pleasantly surprised. How does that score we give compare to another game where we might not have had any expectations and were instead disappointed? How do scores fluctuate between the beginning and end of a tournament once you have a chance to compare teams? The WFDF system is great, but not perfect because it’s hard to stay objective from game to game.

Because we finished first in the round robin we have a bye into semis while the rest of the teams had to battle out further. It was definitely interesting to have just the 8am round and no other games today. The wind for the subsequent rounds picked up substantially making for many long, hot points. Definitely not complaining about the chance to save our legs a little.

Rohre with a 20-year-old camel