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Pirates Rock the Bristol Boat! Day 1
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After two days of Softball, drinking and general tomfoolery, the motley band of Pirates finally sat down to rest their weary legs. We were bleeding, sweating, bruised, hung-over and sunburnt. Half the team couldn't even lift a Softball anymore; the others were too tired to care. Did anyone complain though? Nope, they just wanted to know when the next tournament was!

Yaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrr

Day 1

It all started with a simple comment in the pub of "Let's enter a tournament". With the all new Pirates team ready to go, the Bristol Recreation Invitational Tournament which was aimed at newer teams seemed to fit the bill perfectly. So, at 8am on a Saturday morning the convoy set off across the bridge. Several wrong turns and an emergency stop later, we arrived at our new home for the weekend and it was glorious! Four pristine Softball fields spread out before us, each perfectly marked out and the grass mown to a regulation 10mm. And already on those fields were the other teams, doing some strange ritual which I believe is called "warming up". We felt very much out of our depth!

After a quick Captains meeting, our first match was on Pitch 1, the show ground. We needed a cunning plan in order to get the team motivated for the big stage and thankfully I had one; offer a Crown to everyone who hits a home run and a clown hat if you mess up! With incentives like that it was easy to see how we racked up an impressive 25-6 win against our first opponents, Go Balls Deep.

After that, the games got harder, a lot harder. It wasn't so much that they had better players, it was just the organisation was on a different level to anything we had experienced before. Everyone knew where to stand, where to throw and most importantly, where to hit the ball to score runs. After a draw and a loss, we were beginning to feel the pressure. We were competing, but just falling below the mark. And then we got news that our next opponents were the tournament favourites, the Zambezi Warriors, who had trounced all of their opposition so far. We didn't find out until later but they actually had 3 international players in their line-up! At times like these there was only one thing to do, crack open the beers, and by Jove it worked! We raised our defence to a whole new level against the Warriors. The infield pounced on anything that came their way whilst the outfielders ran as fast and as hard as they could. The game ended in a 3-3 tie and as it happens, we were the only team to come even remotely close to beating them in the whole tournament. God bless alcohol!

With our new confidence and team spirit, we walked over the final opposition of the day, the Cheltnam Old Spa's. Saffy pitched brilliantly whilst Glyn summoned up his last reserves of energy to own the outfield. With that game out of the way, we set off for the part of the weekend we had all been dreading: the pitching of the tents! Whoever invented tents wants shooting as does the bloke behind the desk at Millets that said "It will take you 5 minutes to put up at most", the git. 45 minutes and several hundred curses later, we decided it would be best if we left all the pitching to Lowri and Jane whilst the men went off to gather the food (we put the BBQ on).

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