Mully Matchday 1

Awesome. My long-awaited first post on Ultimate.

So this past Saturday was the first day of competition for the Malaysian Ultimate League (MUL) nicknamed Mully. I was part of the Flying Naan team and we did well. Check out all the results from Matchday 1.

Not too shabby eh? Flying Naan won both their games. Against two of the toughest opponents in the league.

Early on we are leading the pack with a 2-0 record. But I stress again, its still early stages in the league. There are still eight games to be played

So on Saturday I got my mom to get up early to send me all the way to Cheras for the games which were to start at 800am. I thought we wold have trouble finding the place but it wasn't to difficult a task. Got there a few mins before 8am. Quickly put my cleats on and warmed up. Before long, the first game against the INTEC Wildcats started.

Funny enough, I was feeling nervous and under a lot of pressure. So too was Yew Eng which was weird. When we were playing, it really affected us. We dropped a few and didn't manage to D-up well enough. I saw Yew Eng make a nice pass to Joanne to score though.

Enough about our jittery nerves then. How did we do in the game? Early on, it was very apparent people weren't as warmed up as we would like to have been and were making a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately for us, the Wildcats were incredibly lucky. Everytime there was a fumble, they managed to save and gain control of the disc eventhough it looked like they were juggling. Especially their women! Speaking of which, we only had three women on that day. And in line with the rules, every team was required to field at least three women at any given time. That meant that all of our women, Joanne, Jessica and Josephine were required to play every point of both our hour-long games. They did really well!!! In the first half, the score was tight. At one point I think we were even down by a point. We were very slow to warm up. But we managed to make half-time at a score of 7-3. In the second half we were much more collected and we bettered our play, especially or defense. We pulled away and INTEC never had a chance. The score ended up being 10-5. A comfortable victory all in all.

We then got a break from play before the next game. Which was the almighty KBU. Initially I was quite intimidated. I had witnessed the awesome flow and teamwork during pickup at KBU in the previous weeks. To add to that right before our game with them, they swept aside Satu Lagi 11-6.

Going into the KBU game I knew it was a must win game as KBU were one of Naan's main rivals. In a nutshell, the KBU game was probably a more comfortable game than the Wildcats game in spite of the scoreline. Eventhough we conceded 6 goals, our defense was better than in the INEC game. Our 'rabbit' 'D'-play totally shut down the hucks. Good job 'rabbits', Murali and Justin. Another factor that made our victory was that our rabbit play ate up time as all KBU did was keep possession and swung the disc from side to side. In the end we came out victorious 8.5-6.

8.5-6???

Funny score huh? Allow me to explain. Every point in the game that a team has one less female player, they get penalized 0.5 points. So because of injury, Joanne was not able to play 3 points. Thus that incurred a 1.5 point penalty. So actually, we scored 10 goals. But no matter. We still won anyways and the ladies did really well.

At the end of the day I felt that i did a good job. In the KBU game I felt I up-ed my game and played pretty decent. I scored a total of three goals and two assists, which included the crappy-ass pass from Azran that made me lay out for the disc and then pass it on to Kit to score the point that brought half-time. That made me feel goood. Did I mention, I like laying out? Haha.

Check out some of the pics from Matchday 1. All the photos were taken from Belacak. Check the rest out here.

Here's whats lined up for us on Matchday 2 (29th Nov).

Start	End	Field 1	Field 2
08:00 AM	09:00 AM	Flying Naan v Oops	KBU v Wildcats
09:20 AM	10:20 AM	El Ninos v Wildcats	Flying Naan v Satu Lagi
10:40 AM	11:40 PM	Oops v Satu Lagi	El Ninos v KBU

I can't wait.