From britdisc-owner@csv.warwick.ac.uk Thu Oct 8 16:55:14 1998 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by pansy.csv.warwick.ac.uk (8.8.7/8.8.8) id QAA15355 for britdisc-outgoing; Thu, 8 Oct 1998 16:49:34 +0100 (BST) Received: from monsoon.dial.pipex.net (monsoon.dial.pipex.net [158.43.128.69]) by pansy.csv.warwick.ac.uk (8.8.7/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA15334 for <britdisc@csv.warwick.ac.uk>; Thu, 8 Oct 1998 16:49:30 +0100 (BST) Message-Id: <199810081549.QAA15334@pansy.csv.warwick.ac.uk> Received: (qmail 10178 invoked from network); 8 Oct 1998 15:49:12 -0000 Received: from userk956.uk.uudial.com (HELO default) (193.149.73.24) by smtp.dial.pipex.com with SMTP; 8 Oct 1998 15:49:12 -0000 Reply-To: <Matthew.Lowe@dial.pipex.com> From: "Matthew Lowe" <Matthew.Lowe@dial.pipex.com> To: "BritDisc" <britdisc@csv.warwick.ac.uk> Subject: My view (for what its worth) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1998 16:45:22 +0100 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1155 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-britdisc@warwick.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Sorry about the length of this one, look away if your not intrested in this tour debate. The whole current debate on the Tour seems to be losing its aim, there is a lot of bitching hidden within it, and some things which people are taking offence to that maybe weren't supposed to be offencive. the whole thing has got a bit messed up, but I'll add what I think about the tour in the most friendly and hopefully fair way that I can, but apologies now to anyone that takes any offence. Firstly, i like the tour the way it is. As a player for a small Junior team I realise why some people like the current system as it provides them with a chance to play top teams. At this years tour 1 we got to play teams like catch 22 and superfly, game which we really enjoyed, yet on the Sunday we had games of more our level which were also great fun. I know that top level teams want hard games all the time but as far as i can see the tour only gives you easier games for tour 1 and maybe tour 2. By spliting the tour teams like catch, UTI, Druids, Chevvy etc would get more hard games but where would new talented teams come from. The idea of promotion and relagtion has been suggested but people can't really decided how often. if relagation only happened at the end of the tour you would find good teams like touch having to spend a season in division 2, and a team such as VH or superfly may spend a year out of their league playing in division 1 (though they might enjoy getting to play UTI ever couple of weeks). As far as i can tell spliting the tour at the current time would be very dangerous for the following reasons. 1) Is their enough intrest for two events on the same weekend (div1 and div2)? I know it may look like it now but would so many teams be intrested if they had to play in division 2. 2) Would a split help the sport? You may find a situation develope where the gap between the ability of division 1 and division 2 players becomes quite big, a bit like the premiership/division 1 thing that happens in football, a team will play well enough to get promoted but then get thrashed all of next season. 3) Tarting. If BAF had a bad start to the season for example (not having ago at BAF) would Merrick want to play for them in division 2 or would he go join catch or Druids. this is just an example and may not happen, but I think you would find players of good quality jumping to a top team instead of sitting in division 2, this could leave whole teams of novices with no one to teach them skills or some teams may even give up and dispand. Although I'm not pro the tour changing now, I think we should plan to change it in the next few years. I have seen two local uni teams take on massive numbers of freshers in the last few weeks, and this is probably the way the sport is heading, towards a bigger audience, and we need to start planning a full proof system for the time we'll need it, ie get rid of current faults like 1) The difficulty of moving up nd down the tour rankings during the tour 2) Some thing not yet mention in the current debate but "what is more important, the tour or nationals?" Should UTI perform better over the season only to get piped at the post by Catch. catch are a fine team but surely UTI earned the title of national champions for there quality performances through the season. Thats enough from me for the moment, I'm sure people have things to say and any way I want some diner :-) Matt Lowe Matthew.Lowe@Dial.Pipex.com