If it's Monday Morning I must be in....

Perth... or Sydney... or San Francisco.... or back home.

I'm back home now. My brain has no idea what time it is supposed to feel like so getting back into a normal sleep schedule might not be so tough... I hope. The stangest thing about the flight home is that, time wise, we arrived in San Francisco before we left Sydney. The vagaries of the date line.

Probably the best thing that happened to me was the ridiculously loud party in our condo that prevented me from falling asleep before I has to leave Perth on Sunday morning. I don't know how many people where there but they all decided to sing "Living on a Prayer" and other classics at the top of their lungs while jumping up and down on the floor right above my bedroom. They finally all left at some random hour but by then the damage was done and sleep was out of the question since we had to wake up at 4:00am to go catch our flight. I did take one final glance at the upstairs area before I left and the beautiful condo that we arrived at a week earlier had been reduced to a disaster zone thanks to the party. I just hope the fools who decided to host the party had the decency to clean up the place before we turned it back over to the owners. For the record I refuse to pay for any clean up costs or damage that may have been incurred.

The funniest part of the party was bumping into Sam Kennedy at 4:15am as we were pulling out of the parking lot and he was just walking up the driveway. Now wasn't that a party...

Here are my comments on the men's final. We didn't watch any of the other ones because we wanted to surf the Indian Ocean instead (more on that later). Buzz Bullets vs. Thong. Mark predicted a score of 15-13 for "Fuzz Mullets". I said it would end up 17-12. I should have gone with the larger margin that my gut was telling me. We knew that the Buzz Bullets were good because they killed us and rightly so. They were by far the best team that we played; they were extremely skilled, patient, clinical, etc.. Thong didn't impress me that much. Everyone that I talked to who played against Thong couldn't figure out how they made it to the final. I stand by my opinion that Thong lucked out into the final.

The final started out with Buzz taking the first three points. The rout was on. Thong managed to score a couple to make it 5-2 Buzz but Thong did not look good. The final indication that Thong just wasn't going to be able to make a game of it was when Pottsy from Thong threw a hammer 20 yards out of bounds in the face of the Buzz zone. It looked like Buzz started putting in their second and third string players after half which made the score look slightly more respectable at 17-8. But Buzz Bullets ran away it, it wasn't even close. Even though Thong was on average much taller than the Buzz Bullets, the speed and athleticism of the Buzz players more than negated any height advantage the Aussies might have had.

Mark, Dolan and I still can't figure out the zone that the Bullets were using by did it ever work. No one was running hard in the zone, the mark was completely unconcerned with chasing the disc too fast, but Thong could not move through it. It looked like a lazy 1-3-3 zone mixed with a bit of FSU. The Bullets obviously had the zone dialed in because there were virtually no holes for Thong to move through (even we had more luck going through that zone). The Bullets were in no rush to force anything and were quite happy to chase the disc across the field because it wasn't going upfield at all. I guess they didn't need to force anything because after a while they knew that someone would try something stupid like throwing a hammer into the crowd.

Congratulations to Buzz for killing everyone they played. They were the class of the field and deserve to be the World Champions. Any and all American/Canadian teams that claim that there should be an asterisk next to the Buzz Bullets win because the "top" American/Canadian teams weren't in Perth can just stop right now. The Buzz Bullets deserve the title and even had the so called "top" teams like Furious and Sockeye been there, I'm not sure that they would have fared much better against the Buzz Bullets.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can find the time to recap our tournament; what we could have done better, worse or what went just right.

DF