Rich, Gabor and I headed down to Ottawa for the Shield yesterday. The field was a little weaker than usual cause some of my club and the Estoc guys weren't there but it was still a pretty good field.
For some reason the organizers decided to do pools of 8 so that took a while. I had my own pool which was pretty easy but I dropped a bout to Pascal because he just fenced a lot harder than me and I messed up some simple actions with him. Other than that I had a close one with Dima, and then it was pretty much smooth sailing. I finished the pool 6-1 with a pretty good indicator and was seeded 5th.
I had a bye first and then came up against Jason, who I've fenced with since I was 13 or 14 because when I was starting he was fencing at UBC. Luckily I've improved a lot since then so I took that one pretty easily. It was close for a while but I started to move a bit more to use my speed to my advantage. I got one really sick parry riposte to his foot and the guys who were watching went crazy over it.
Next up I had Mike because he had upset Christophe (which was kind of awesome cause Christophe had beat me in repechage at the last nac but kind of ****ty cause I wanted to beat Christophe up really badly). Mike is long but he's slow so he got up 5 or 6 to 1 at the beginning when I was doing straight attacks and getting nailed but after I started working on my distance (moving in and out to set up my attacks) I started to dominate. It finished 15-10.
Next I had Thomas, who's coaching at Karl's club. He's a biiiiiig French fencer who was on their cadet team a couple years ago and did junior world cups with the team up to last year. Because he's a lot bigger than me he looks older but he's my age. I've been looking forward to fencing him for a while because Karl keeps telling me how good he is.
I decided not to push things too hard at the beginning because he intimidated me a bit so we fenced pretty slowly and most of the touches that happened in the 1st were because he forced the action. I didn't capitalize on all my opportunities at the beginning of the period because I was a little tight but as it went on I calmed down and started to make my touches.
The match was tight throughout, 4-4 after the first, 11-11 after the 2nd and then right at the end I lost my head a bit and handed over the match. At 12-12 I did a step, feint to the hand, lunge to the foot, which I had landed a few times in that match; however this time he was ready for it and pulled his foot back and counter-attacked for a single. Next action, I do it again! 14-12 for him, so on the next action, I switched up the target and did the same action but finished to the knee, which gave me the slight surprise that I needed to beat out his counter-attack. And at 14-13 I did the same feint disengage attack to the foot again and got nailed with a counter-attack to hand over the match on a silver platter.
I need to examine why I fenced so unintelligently at the end of the match... if it was simply that I'm not well-conditioned enough to think well at the end of a tough match right now then that's really easy to fix. If it's something else then I want to figure out what it was.
Things that I need to remember worked against this guy: 4 pressure, flick to the inside (hand mostly); beat 2 and then go high or low; hits to the thigh, knee area; attacks to the body finishing with a coupé.
Overall the tournament was pretty good but in the end I didn't beat a single fencer who I would classify as "tough". I really need to do that extra 2% of training that's going to turn these hardfought losses into satisfying wins.
02-09-2009 01:48 PM