Regionals Roundup

Couple of surprises coming out of Regionals this weekend:

Scotland (1 Spot): (Nothing on Britdisc yet but I don't see any other result having happened) 1. Fusion - No surprises here.
Northern (3 Spots): 1. Chevron, 2. Man Up, 3. Vision - The Brown didn't enter which threw my predictions off straight away. LeedsLeedsLeeds will be out of Nationals for the first time since their inception (as far as I can tell). Considering in 2005 they were national runners up and in 2007 were tied 3rd, they have fallen quite a lot. Leeds has a good history to their team and no doubt will be looking to bounce back next season.
Midlands (2 Spots): EMO won and Cambridge came second. Lemmings challenged for qualification, finishing third like last year, but this region went to seeding. BAF didn't enter and JR didn't do very well so it looks like this region wasn't as hotly contested as I previously thought it might be.
South West (2 Spots) (Nothing on britdisc yet, here was my prediction): 1. Devon, 2. Cardiff. This seems likely as Devon and Cardiff are the only two teams from the South West registered as submitting entry to Open Nationals and Bristol are registered as entered to Mixed Nationals.
South East (3 Spots): 1. DED, 2. Brighton, 3. Wessex. Again, this went to plan.
London (5 Spots):
Kapow started their day against Flump. We won 13-2 (I think) and moved on to Fire 2. We psyched ourselves up, started on Offense and didn't look back. We won out 13-5 through good defense and solid offense. We wanted to prove a point and though the offense wasn't quite as fluid as it was at Tour 3 we definitely made a statement.
We were then in the 1-4 group and had guaranteed nationals but we weren't done. We had a semi final against 11 time national champions Clapham. We played offense well and the D-Line turned them in every point, and Kapow finished the half 8-7 up.
We traded all the way up to 10-10, and then Clapham really turned up their defense breaking us twice in a row to go up 12-10 game to 13. We brought it back to 12-11 before Clapham decided to play their best offense of the game, patiently finding the endzone to end our hopes of dropping the 11 times national champions to starting at 7th seed at nationals. Clapham as a unit didn't have an off game as such, but their Offense definitely made some uncharacteristic mistakes. Kapow's defense was good at creating the turns, and if they could have converted maybe 1 more the result may have been different. We were happy with our performance nonetheless and moved on to our 4th game without a break to finish the day.
Our last game was against Tooting Tigers. We started slow and they were pumped. Their offense was pretty good and held against our defense who was probably a little tired after the clapham game. I found their forces to be the strongest I attempted to break all day so that was tough for our Offense and they broke us one more time than we broke them and we were down at half 7-5. By the end of the game we had won in sudden death 11-10 but we had our backs to the wall for a lot of it, and Tooting had chances to win. We didn't play our best which was a shame coming off our strong performance against Clapham, but still managed to take the win and 3rd place at Regionals. We will have tough games at Nationals and if we want to qualify for Euros we can't afford to come off strong showings in tough games and not play our best in the following games. We will need to beat some top teams in order to qualify and Nationals will be a step up from this season so far.
We've accomplished what we needed to, to put us in a good place for Euros qualification, but our toughest challenge is yet to come.
Final placings:
1. Clapham
2. Fire 1
3. Kapow
4. Tooting Tigers
5. Burro (another shock, who could have predicted they would pick up the Australian Junior Team coach for Regionals and beat Fire 2...)

Biggest drops this year:
Fire 2: 2011 Tour ranking - 6th, Nationals Finish - 11th, 2012 Tour ranking - 15th, Nationals - Did not qualify
LeedsLeedsLeeds: 2011 Tour ranking - 10th, Nationals Finish - 9th, 2012 Tour ranking - 14th, Nationals - Did not qualify
The Brown: 2011 Tour ranking - 16th, Nationals Finish - 14th, 2012 Tour ranking - 19th, Nationals - Did not qualify
Bristol: 2011 Tour ranking - 23rd, Nationals Finish - 12th, 2012 Tour ranking - 30th, Nationals - Did not qualify (presumed)