Red Sevens at the opening ceremony. Arthur had his ipod on the whole time they made speeches. FonJen wearing the yellow Bunker King head wrap and Pony is in the black cap.
Filling pods - Arthur gave us 2 Paintball Caddys (blue one in front of him and me) and plus my pod bitch (small Ben is holding it on the left) - we filled all our pods pretty quickly. While we were doing this people who picked up our pods were handing them back to us as they walked by.
The opening ceremony line up- you can spot "Datuk" Junaidi on the far right.
Team Ku is in Blue, Khaine is the only white guy at the whole tournament so he's easy to spot. FonJen is at the back proudly wearing his Red Sevens T shirt the whole day. Arthur is on the front far right in red. Ryan who lent us the Minis is behind Ryo and Michiko wearing blue sunglasses and Pony is right behind Michiko. Next to Jane is Allan who met us for dinner on our first night in Taipei- he shot Khaine in the ass.
We got up at 7 had breakfast at 8 and left for the field at around 830 - having the hotel so close to the field is really convenient because its just a 2 min walk and you dont have to worry about getting transport to ferry people and gear bags to the field.
I have always talked about wanting to play paintball in a cold country - well I finally got my wish. The weather was in the mid 20s – nice cool air con, no sun, slight breeze and the air was dry so when you sweat it doesn't stick around for long. You could wear your jersey the whole day.
We played Team Ku in our first game. The night before we worked out who was going to play games one to three four etc and we worked out 4 game plans. We lost the first set to Ku- won the second one and they two the next two- Game to Ku. I was pretty ok that we took one game from them.
The next game was with one of the Taiwanese teams. This was without a doubt the match of the whole weekend. We lost the first 2 games – but got back one on the second game. In game 4 – I played my best t game of my tournament going up the middle and bunkering out their car wash and touched for our second point. So we were tied at 2-2 with about 240 on the clock. It went to game 5. And it was a close game and at the end it was Jane vs 2 guys. She shot already one out and it went to 1 on 1 with about a min left on the clock. WE and the whole crowd were then screaming for Jane to go touch the flag to score the winning point. But she was on their 30s and kept her gun pointing at end. They traded shot for what seemed like half an hour – this whole time everyone was screaming for Jane to go touch their flag. Big Ben and Pony dashed our of our pit area and bolted down the filed to yell at her to go touch. Jane finally shot their last man and still had her gun up. Everyone was tearing their hairs out because the clock was running down. Eventually she touched it at 28 seconds and we scored our win.
I think this game showed everyone including the Kaohsiung Games officials how exciting Paintball and the M7 format can get. We came back from 2 games down – tied it at 2-2. Game point with time running out and it went down to 1 on 1 and the winning point was scored with 28 seconds to go. Cant beat that and I think every player who was there saw a new aspect of the game which is playing for time and for points.
We lost the next 2 matches and didn't qualify for the final four. So we crewed and coached for Team Ku- which they admitted had the best support and coaching. We lined up spotters along the spectator side and information was passed down the tape and translated into Japanese. I learnt something new then too- that its good to have a spotter just spotting and not coaching. And passing the information means getting the message down the line rather than having it drowned out by the crowd.
Ku and Infernal make it into the finals as to be expected and everyone was screaming from the sidelines and taking bets too. Infernal only had one coach where as the slight underdogs Ku had most of the support in the crowd.
One of the best teams in Taiwan is Formosa who took third - they are exciting to watch.
Congratulations to Infernal and to Team Ku too for giving everyone a good show. I spoke to Ulrich afterwards and he was very positive about the success of the event. The City of Kaohsiung officials were impressed with what they saw there is a high probability that we will be back in June but in a bigger scale. There will definitely teams from Europe and its just a matter for getting more teams from other parts of the world to send teams.
Kudos to Jane for being the hero of the day and having to use the heavy Dynasty Shocker too.
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