I had just come home and had to clean the whole kitchenfloor after an incident with a bag of trash I was carrying to the trashcan, when I was asked by Gravgon if I could admin the game between Sweden and Czech (I swear I'll spell it "Chech" at least once during this report!) Republic. Since I also had cleaned my one and only tv sofa a couple minutes earlier I couldn't waste the Sunday evening watching TV either, so I thought I might as well admin the game after all.

Now, let's see, Sweden is, hands down, one of the 3 favorites to win this whole league. Czech Republic, however eager and dedicated they are, are not. That's what the situation was coming into this game. But the game had to be played regardless. And that's the beauty of NDML; the not so strong teams get a chance to face the top teams in the group stage. The outcome however can be classified as the not so beautiful side of NDML; the games tend to be a tad one sided.

Anyway, we still had to pick a server and chose the maps, and gathering the troops before the battle. It wasn't hard choosing a server though, Pogo thought a German server might be the best place to start the search for an even server. He wasn't 100% correct, but both teams thought the server was neat enough and agreed to play there. Sweden agreed to play with a slight ping disadvantage (Pogo having 85 while the rest of the Swedes had around 40-45, while the Czech team had 20-30 and one player with about 60). The Czechs chose to play q2dm7, while the swedes ended up picking q2dm1. And then the game started.

First map: q2dm1 - Sweden's choice



Well, you know the game is going to be onesided when one of the two teams struggle to get a single frag for quite some time. Even though the Czech Republic held the lift for a while, Sweden just dominated this map from the beginning. It was merciless railwhoring most of the game. Slonken, positioned at rail, passed rails to his teammates and soon the whole Swedish team had rails. At the beinning Sweden seemed to be playing sorta FFAish, with people running all over the map looking for spawnfrags with the rail, however in the chaos I think I could see that Zorre and NaSSaL held mega position while Pogo had the lift. The Czechs didn't stand the slightest chance at all. I was switching povs a lot early on, seeing who had a good day. It soon became clear that NaSSaL had a deadly day with the rail, and I mean deadly. 87/137 rails says it all, he railed a solid 63,5% and delivered 11162 points in damage! So, the man of the match was NaSSaL. Funny part was when Zorre was down in water missing rail upon rail on two blasting enemies, and down from nowhere drops NaSSaL, and rails both of them in a single railshot. Pretty neat :P Just stuff like that that keeps these games entertaining from a spectator point of view, as the game was very onesided.


Second map: q2dm7 - Czech Republic's choice



So, what did the Czechs have up their sleeve on this map? I wasn't sure, but thought that maybe they stood a better chance on this map since there was no rail for NaSSaL to whore. But, I knew that Sweden was just that strong a team that they could dominate this map too. Czech did replace Rambler with Marty, while the Swedish team remained the same. The start again showed what sort of game we were gonne see. Sweden, again, totally dominated from the beginning. Slonken and Zorre holding RA never giving it away, while NaSSaL ran around fragging with SSG and hyper. Pogo was positioned at RL. I followed Pogo for quite some time, since I figured this position would be the one the Czech would try to attack as I thought they would be slaughtered by RA. RL position is a hard position to totally dominate, cause you don't have that much ammo or the RA up there, and the limited space mixed with the RL and nade splashdamage makes it even harder. But still, Pogo did a good job there early on with a nice Rl aim, and picked up quite a few spawns up there. But about 5 minutes or so into the match, after being outbattled all over the map, the Czech Republic somehow managed to outnumber poor Pogo and started what would be the pattern for the rest of the game: all Cz players at RL! It became almost comical how they held that position at times, 3-4 guys up there spamming rockets and nades at whoever tried to come up the ladder. The Swedes answered by spamming hyper from the healthpack corridor towards the RL, and by trying to jump up to RL up the slope near the spawnpad. But they struggled to some degree to launch successful attacks, was suprised at the number of failed jump attempts. Not that they didn't frag the Czechs at a steady pace, it was just that the Czechs were focusing more on holding the RL more than anything else, seemed that their tactic was to get fragged untill they spawned into position by RL/GL :P Hehe, anyway, the #1 goal near the end was to kill slonken only once, as he had a perfect score for almost the entire game. With less than 5 minutes left, after declaring that he would kill slonken, Wision finally managed to kill him with a nade when slonken had 5 health or so left. A small victory in the match, but those moments sure makes it more fun for the other team in a game like this. Not everyone took it with such a good mood as Wision though, near the end Jenskiller left, and half a minute or so before the game ended Marty left too. NaSSaL didn't like that much, but by now I was preparing the tedious work of putting in playerscores and uploading screeenshots etc after the game. It's a man's job being an admin.

Anyway, good games. Clearly two teams on different skillevel, but good to see some games being played at all! Good luck to the Czechs in their next game, and to Sweden as well, allthough they shouldn't be needing it anytime soon.

Wonder if I managed to spell Czech correct the whole report through.. :)