NUS Judo Champions

i miss alot of my friends. it has been a really long time since i went out with another one else. except of course who else.and why am i not trying to be with the girl i like? all my own doing oink oink.. maybe i like this separation, haha as if.. too much time to be spent on judo and studies.. no time for other stuff soo no no right now.. anyway i shall meet up with the adventurous aces! after my exams.. dear irwin, meikhay kenneth and jezamine.. the two girls are working already and i am in the first year..still i am doing away with punctuation nowadays. the next would be grammar. followed by spelling. and finally i will no longer write. just kidding. woke up really late today, the after effects of yesterday's massive judo competition. did not much study. 3 chapters. so it is late at night. i shall burn the oil abit more after this. and YES. NUS won back the TITLE after squandering it to a extremely powerful SMU team last year. i shall record this momentous event down here.
there were 7 teams in all, two from NUS, two from NYP, one from SMU, one from NTU and one from Republic poly. SMU were the holders for last year, with two national female players and the heavy weight champion.
The team event goes like this. 7 members in a team, with 5 competing players and 2 reserves. out of the 5, 3 are guys and 2 are girls. so we play one guy one girl one guy one girl and one guy, simple. two teams face each other, first player from each team come up, usually the strongest, and fight begins with two of them for 3 minutes. and it goes on for the remaining 4 players. with the team having most number of wins going through to the next round.
as can be seen from the table, there are two sides, with nus A, smu and nyp on one side and nus B, ntu, nyp and RP on the other side. Now it was a headache trying to figure out which team to fit into which side and which players should we field on each team. SMU is naturally a team everyone fears. or feared. then we saw the quality of the girls from ntu, lots of them from HCJC school team, ntu is to be feared as well. then there is NYP with 4 brown belters around, two of whom are extremely tall and well built and the other two girls.
Most teams would try to avoid SMU, so it would be easy to see that NYP would play their best team on the right. so should we have our best team on the right and play two rounds before reaching the finals or should we have a head on clash with SMU on the left side ? then even if we stake it out on the right, there is NTU and NYP.
I had already thought of the lineup to face smu days ago. now the sticky question of ntu and NYp just disrupts my plans. I had wanted to go straight for SMU's best player and play our best girl against their second best girl. Of course, their lineup is unknown to me, but after much careful deliberation, of course their best player would be first and most probably they would want more points faster, good for morale and they will put Cheryl GOh( familiar name? sea games silver medalist... or was it bronze.. does it matter?) second as to wrap up two points in the first two games.
I had thought our game to be in the finals as most likely i would opt to evade them by taking the other route. but that was before i realise ntu and nyp had strong teams.
so we discussed it over lunch. we discussed it for another hour after lunch before submitting the final name list. the risks are there. but if the stronger team were to face smu earlier, we would be fresher and it would be a do or die thing. anyway we would have to face them in the finals if we chose to start on the right and have the weaker team on the left.
though i used stronger and weaker teams , the strength of both our nus teams turned out to be really fine and commendable. Phuong , jerry , and jiayong really were impressive. the girls were good as well. hongjiang faced too terrible opponents so it was hard on him while alby faced easy preys so..
in the end we decided to have the stronger team face SMU straight away and the other team fight it out on the right side. so in team A would be me, jerry alby and jianhao together with selene, liling and forgot who the other girl is... while team A would be PHuong, Jiayong, Hongjiang, Connor, Mingli, Cailing, Lijuan.
we faced SMU in our first round and i had thought the first match would be crucial.(naturally NYP opted their weaker team to play with SMU first and SMU won easily) with two of their girls being very strong, any one of our three guys lose, the game would be over. further more, team morale would be important, better to defend a point then to try and recover a lost point.
Earlier on, i had already played with Wenyun..(SMU's best player..) and not for the first time in my career i had lost a match due to silliness and carelessness. last minute of the game i had tried something foolish and it shall be a year again before i try for the individual title again.
ALby and Jerry who were in the team did not want or dare to play with wenyun, alby being convincingly thrown by wenyun just now and jerry is too light. so i shall face him again. somehow having played with him earlier on.. though losing, i felt confident.
we played again. and i won. down to the last minute my team mates performed even better by winning 3 out of the 4 remaining games. of course Cheryl goh won her bout. liling did extremely well by beating the other girl, winnifred.. winnifred had injured a finger on her left hand in an earlier game i think and it was all bandaged up. something which we did not really mind..
i am tired.. shall return to my books and continue another day.