Day 3 – Italy Competition
Another long day, we all made it for breakfast at 7:00 and I’ve just back to my room at 22:26. But must say it’s been a great day for all of the squad.
Another good day of high standard competition and of competent refereeing. In many competitions, one sees referees being intimidated by the competitors and coaches and doing a poor job. The last couple of days has shown the referees here to be pretty good and they took no crap from competitors nor coaches. Discipline was firm but fair, with several disqualification for poor control. In one case both competitors got disqualified for getting somewhat fractious with one another, A harsh but necessary object lesson. One of the best things I had to comment on, was that one of the teams seems to contain a lot of ‘divers.’ That is, if they are getting bested in a match, they start to fall down at the slightest hint of a technique. One of them got disqualified for doing exactly this today. In my view good riddance, we are practising Martial Artists and should behave as such.
Magnanimous in victory and gracious in defeat.
Today was the day for all of the individual events starting off with the various ladies Kata events before moving onto the Mens Kata events. Then at lunchtime moving onto the Kumite events.
We had a few nail biting moments with Jess before it was confirmed that she had reached the finals of the Cadet B (16-17 yrs) Shotokan Karate with a good performance after some heavy competition against some top Italian and Serbian competitors. Holly and Mitchell Roberts from Bicester both pulled in a strong performance to reach the finals of the Shito Ryu events as did Kai Collins. Next up was Edward who was in the Cadet A (14-15 yrs) Males Shotokan category and did a great Bassai Dai in the quarter finals to reach the semi finals, although he produced a strong Enpi in the semi final, it wasn’t quite enough to secure a place in the final.
A brief stop for lunch and we moved onto the Kumite with the females leading the way again. The squad had a number of top notch competitors from the Cadets through to the Juniors across all of the weight categories, so an afternoon of excitement was seen. If today was anything to go by, the finals will be great.
Jess was up fairly soon and was in great form , convincingly beating her Bosnian competitor with a 6-0 win in the semi final to ensure a place in the final against an Italian opponent. Ed went up against a tough Russian competitor and beat him to face a Ukrainian in the semi final. The semi lasted some while and it was a tough bout, Edward lost the match but picked up some valuable lessons and a Bronze Medal, the first from Basingstoke.
There were many highlights today for example Joby Wilson fought some good matches to take himself through to the final. The best technique I saw from him was a score with a reverse roundkick. Good clean and definitive techniques, all made the Refs jobs easier and hard for his opponents to block. I didn’t get to see everyone’s fight, but the strength in depth of our team is self evident.
Total medal haul up to the end of today and before going into the individual and team finals tomorrow.
The England squad currently has:-
Gold Medals – 4
Silver Medals – 5
Bronze Medals – 18 (might be a few light here)
Plus
There are four competitors in with a medal chance for the kata tomorrow
Plus guaranteed Gold or silver for the eight teams into the team Kumite finals tomorrow and the 19 people fighting in the individuals Kumite events.
Roll on Day 4.
Joby in action