Road to EUC: Women's Division Notes from Tom's Tourney

Notes from the streams and the results

The first big warmup event for many international teams took place in Bruges at the weekend. How much stock can you place in the performances at a warmup event two months before the main event? Very little. For context, here are the placements from warmups for EUC 2019 for all the teams that competed there- notably for the top 3 teams at EUC there was no success in warmups tournaments!

As a coach I’d always prefer to struggle a bit in the buildup - if something is working well I’ll use it less and prioritise figuring out plans B, C, D, E, F.

Although I don’t think that placements are important, early performances can give an indication of how teams are developing. Where are they looking strong, where do they need to improve?

Results vs National Teams

We got a good few national team matchups at Tom’s, I’ve included all the international games in the table below. There obviously isn’t a lot to go on yet, what’s interesting is that the goal difference is quite tight. None of these teams have been hammering each other. Definitely promising for an interesting week at EUC.

Notes on Teams

GB took the win at Tom’s Tourney and beat France and Netherlands along the way. I was impressed with GB’s play. The Brew-Kwok-Naden trio on offence played extremely well, and really showcased an ability to consistently score quickly. This is really important in tight games - if the other offence isn’t able to score quickly and cleanly you scoring quickly piles on the pressure and doesn’t allow them to reset.

The GB D line looked athletic and able to crank up the pressure in spells. When they got turns they didn’t need to play perfect offence because they had Molly Wedge who was unstoppable in the air. Without Wedge creating opportunities they did have difficulty converting. Overall, GB really punished teams using speed and size. Whether the conditions in Limerick will allow them to use those advantages we’ll have to see.

France also had a good tournament, getting to the semi-finals and beating finalist Shout along the way. In the matchup vs GB they looked small on D - particularly struggling to shut down the shots to Naden and Wedge - which is something they’ll need to figure out. Their zone was more effective at slowing GB down but it wasn’t really productive conditions for it. D line offence really struggled in that game, not able to convert on opportunities when they came.

On offence, they looked skilled and fast with some great flowing points. Strong foundations. Some adjustments to their spacing (cutters far away and bunched = too many resets) and figuring out how they can generate some easier scores would make them more of a threat - plenty of time in the season to do that and they have the firepower.

Czech performed pretty well. They have some interesting raw material in the team, key over the next two months will be searching for some more consistency on offence and tightening up their defence. Too many simple mistakes on both sides of the disc right now to make a realistic run to semi-finals, which I think they have the ability to do.

Belgium have had a busy start to their season, already playing 5 games vs international teams. Their Plan A on offence is really good - they must lead with GB in the ability to score within 2-3 passes consistently - but the problems come when the games breaks down. Grinding out points when plan A isn’t working or is shut down is something that looks a struggle, but again, plenty of time to figure that out.

I’m not sure what to make of the Netherlands team. They had a really good win against Belgium in a Test Match, a dominant second half performance leading to a comfortable win, and they had a respectable 13-11 loss to GB at Tom’s. Those two performances, plus the strength of the top of the roster, should indicate a very good team. But their performance on stream vs De Skeagh was littered with errors on offence .

Austria were streamed in horrible conditions vs Jinx. This looks like it was their worst result of the weekend so maybe can’t read too much into the play here. Their biggest issue in this game was their offence which really relied on the handlers to generate the initial play. Their vertical stack to begin the game was particularly poor at generating offence from downfield - very static and far away. A switch to a side stack was a little better but didn’t really fix that underlying issue.

This first point switching to side stack highlights how far away and static their stack is. When the reset falls over they are fortunate to take down the bailout huck. From there they actually play decent offence - throughout the game when they played closer to the endzone they were much better because it forced everyone to be closer to the disc and they could actually generate downfield options.

In this second example, they do a better job of getting an option from downfield to trigger the play, then opening up a ton of space to work with off a swing…but again their stack is too deep and static to capitalise.

Defensively Austria tried a number of different things which if you’ve been following my posts for a while you know I really like.

Spain weren’t streamed, so I don’t have any notes for them. Sorry Spain.