IOST 2012 Review

Squad
Rob, Johanna, Orla, John (c), Colm, Jacinta, Andrew, Evan, Breandan, Catherine and Turlough. Graham and Ger joined us from the Cork softball team too.

This years IOST was held in the Pavilion in the University of Limerick with all of the games being played on astro turf. It must be said that this is an excellent facility for a softball tournament although playing softball on perfectly flat pitches took a while to get used to.

The team arrived very ridiculously early on Saturday morning to glorious Limerick sunshine and an excellent new facility, sadly we lost all of our games on Saturday losing to the Suspects, Belfast, Marley's first team, The Stingers (who traveled from the UK) and the Renegades. It took us some time to adapt to the new surface which cost us early on, who would have thought that adapting to a perfectly flat pitch in the sunshine would be something we would struggle with! We also struggled with the usual Galway issue with hour long breaks between games. We left the pitches on Saturday with a chance to redeem ourselves in the Bowl league tournament on Sunday. Lust, Belfast and Castleknock also qualified for the Bowl tournament.

We took the opportunity on Saturday night for an introspective team meeting, we spent many hours discussing how we could improve as a team and what we needed to do win a game. We all then went to bed early to rest and recuperate before Sundays games. This is the official record of the weekends tournament and this recollection of events that night is what will stand in the official record.

It turns out our hard work on Saturday night worked as we won our first game on Sunday morning beating Lust to break our losing streak from Saturday. It was a good morale boost that wasn't tempered by losing our next game to the Castleknock in a low scoring encounter. We then beat Belfast to finish the Bowl League tournament in second place meaning we played Lust again in the Bowl semi final.

After 2 hours off it took us a little while to get a rhythm going again and by the end of the second innings we were 7-3 behind. We got going again after that and started clawing back some runs finishing the third innings 7-7 and the fourth 9-9. We fielded the top of what would be the final innings and conceded only one run meaning we went to bat the bottom of the last needing 2 runs to win. We quite quickly got the first run required to take us to 10-10, we then worked a runner into a scoring position on third. The on deck batter stepped up ready to go when the umpire called time ending the game after the allotted 50 minutes was up.

The tournament rules stated that no new inning could occur after 45 minutes after the start time and games must stop after 50 minutes and the score would go back to the last completed innings which was the fourth innings that was tied at 9-9, the tournament rules then stated that if level the game would be counted back to the previous innings which was again 7-7. This left the game tied again without a tournament rule to cover the situation. The umpire then called the tournament organisers who decided that the game should be counted back until there was a winner which meant that the game went back to the second inning which ended with Lust in front by 7 runs to our 3 meaning Lust qualified for the Bowl final.

It's a hard way to go out of a tournament but we gave our all to get back level in a game we fell behind in. Congratulations to Lust who went on to win the Bowl after our semi final beating Belfast in the final. Congratulations must also go to the Limerick Ori-gin-als who successfully defended their IOST Cup.

As requested I have included a picture of an example why you really shouldn't slide on astro turf, click here to see but I warn you it's not a good looking leg, the cut is pretty gruesome too.

The last incident of note that happened over the weekend that needs to be reported on was that Colm bit his tongue. Colm know that the thoughts of the club are with you through this tough time.

I would like to thank Graham and Ger from Cork for helping us out on Saturday, giving us the much needed chance to rotate some players.

Overall I believe we all had an enjoyable weekend, we played some softball, drank some beer, watched softball in the sunshine and drank some beer. The MVP competition and the end of season party will all be sorted out in due course but other than that I'll see you all on Wednesday for training.