You guys may not have trained, but you sure aint a bunch of rookies. Each one of you was already of a high standard when you formed Northern Heroes. The fact that you did not train just means that you really under achieved this year.
Still where does that leave the rest of us??
With a lot of work to do still
DW, I think the point is, any team who gains such a significant degree of success in what is supposed to be a competitive environment can only indicate a depressed level of play within that league.
We need a systematic change to our leagues and teams if we are to ever have any real aspirations for becoming competitive in the European environment.
The only real gem of genuine Brit success I can glean form European Paintball at the moment is the Kelly's.
Div one of the Millennium is truly competitive and for them to turn up at Campaign with the job they had to do, and then do it in the fashion they did, does indicate true class and I think they will become the pre-eminent Brit Pro team if they can back-fill those last few jigsaw pieces.
We obviously saw the likes of brat pack NK strutting their stuff in the M5 and I hope they can keep that momentum going to carry over into the more competitive environment of the amateur divisions because for those kids to show that sort of success at that age does bode well for the future.
Shockwave started the season with a bang and ended on a fizzle which is surprising because of the sheer amount of practice those guys were putting in, especially just prior to Campaign.
I think Shock practiced more than any other UK team coming into Campaign and if anything, their line up is stronger than when they started the season and yet they finished weaker.
It's obvious where their problems lay because their individual levels of play are high, they just have to toughen up mentally to allow a consistent performance to surface instead of buckling sometimes when they have a bad result.
But apart from these, things look bleak unless we begin to change grass roots tourney paintball and what is immediately obvious to me at least is the number of teams we have training quite regularly who maybe show some success in the PA, NSPL, Masters, whatever but when it comes to stepping up into the real leagues (no disrespect intended to anyone here) then this jump into Millennium mode tends to highlight our real levels of play ..... which is basically abysmal.
This can only mean one of two things, either we are inherently crap players or we are training incorrectly.
I will let you guys make the obvious conclusion from those two options.
If we truly have these number of teams committing to this level of improvement and training then something is seriously wrong with the way these going are doing it because Nexus did the sh1t they did in 2003 with training no more than once every 3 weeks if I think back across that entire first year.
I will add something however, it's no good just going thru the motions of training, you have to have that mindset, that greed for success, that drive to compete.
Go watch Kellys play if you need to tap into what I am talking about here, they might not have the organizational infrastructure or sophistication of play but what those guys do have is raw talent, raw aggression and a very real raw commitment to attack.
It oozes out of them, before, during and after the games, I have smelt it on them. I smelt it on them at Campaign, it's no coincidence they won... it truly isn't.
Now enough already of this back-slapping them northern monkeys, people might think I am going soft if I continue in that vein but hey, I see a lot of my first-year Nexus in those guys, I just hope they now get the support from the industry to allow that raw talent to flourish.
Back to the rest of us.........as I said, I will let this thread run out till after the weekend and then I will come back in with a few suggestions.
