Paintball tournaments can be harsh events, and the World Cup is the cruellest of them all - the sheer scale of the event means many teams will meet with disappointment. This tournament has, over the years, etched itself into Paintballer history, with the best teams in each bracket making their tortuous way to victory. With over 80 10-Man teams in attendance, this year's event promised more of the same. The prime position of the World Cup has been earned quite legitimately; by virtue of the number of teams and nations represented, this is the one tournament that can truly boast to be the world's number one. Time to cut to the chase: Aftershock (the team I play for), won this year's 10-Man Pro final. The team's unprecedented failure to make the first cut in Portland had everybody scampering around speculating about our imminent demise and virtually writing us off for this year's big one. Normally, when somebody who has just won a major competition subsequently writes about it, everything to do with that tournament is legitimised, sanitised and packaged in a most sympathetic manner. Not this time. I arrived on the Friday, a week prior to the start of the 10-Man, and the site was a shambles. Earth-movers were desperately racing against the clock to try and get the parking area flat, and the Sup'Air Ball and Hyperball fields were still being prepared. The trade tent was housed in a clearing in the woods with minimal parking to one side; this meant difficulties for all those companies brave enough to come up with the considerable asking price to exhibit at the world's biggest Paintball event. Some companies declined to take the organisers up on their offer and this deprived the event of a certain legitimacy and impartiality. Outfits like National Paintball decided that the asking price was way too much for what they were getting. Their declination was more a point of principle that anything else, but this and other omissions from the trade tent did little to quell the unease felt by many companies who attended. If this was a Paintball extravaganza, then National Paintballs T2000 truck was a must and instead of trying to charge them an inordinate sum of money just to park the semi up, it should have been welcomed as part and parcel of the show. In previous years the whole kit and caboodle was staged in an open area of flat grassland adjacent to the playing fields. Perfect! The cost of the hire of this piece of land was, allegedly. $5000. Consider for a moment, the scale of monies taken in entrance fees alone: 100 odd 5-Man teams at $650 a hit, 15 or so Pro 10-Man teams and $2,350 a hit and 70 odd Amateur teams at $1750. Entry fees alone work out at something in the order of $220,000. Stick on that they money taken for the trade booths, whether it be in cash or goods, and you will have some idea of the scale of things. Now, relocation of the trade tent and everything else to a clearing in the woods was a joke - and a cheap one at that. All for the sake of a measly five grand. First off, the event is in Florida, where it is generally so humid you can risk drowning just by breathing. If you put a tent in the woods where one side is flanked by trees, it doesn't take Albert Einstein to work out that breezes would now be at a minimum for those unfortunate people labouring all day in the tent. The previous placement was in an open, flat field and any breeze around was felt by all. This location had all the trade raps wearing flippers as they sweated their way through the day. Basically, there was little thought for the paying customer, as for the fields, well, the Hyperball was a joke. It was poorly designed and hastily constructed on a terrain that resembled a WWI battlefield. Why the hell things were running so late is a mystery to me, as the decision to move things inside the woods must have been made long ago. So why on earth leave the preparation to such a late stage?

The woodland fields had no real maintenance done on them since last year and the spectacle of last years bunkers diminished in size and integrity was reflected on field after field. The attempts to flatten the Sup'Air Ball field proved to be futile and in a last, ironic twist to this sorry state of affairs, the flat area previously mentioned was re-rented to host the Sup'Air Ball. An ignomious tribute to a startling lack of preparation. Now, when I go to the Pittsburgh NPPL or Chicago, the food vendors have a field day, what does the World Cup boast as its offerings to the hungry Paintballer? Not a lot. In fact the only real choice that I could discern was whether to have your burger warm or not so warm, depending how long it had sat drying out while waiting to be sold. This was the choice of food: burgers(no cheese, and they were not available on two occasions I went up for them), hot dogs and ham subs. The equipment used to cook these culinary delicacies looked as though it had been dug up from the Hyperball field. The Ebola virus could not have survived contact with that thing - it was disgusting. This was the imaginative extent of the World's premier Paintball event for culinary delight. Now, I'm not an American but one of the things I have learnt about Yanks is that in the morning a nice cup of coffee is a pre-requisite for the day ahead. A basic necessity in anyone's book? Not in this book mate. There was no coffee, no tea and no brains on show. What the hell motivated this glaring oversight? I have no idea; it was unprofessional, insulting and ultimately a joke.

Now to move on to the good points. The judging this year must have been tortuous, all the refs deserved medals for their efforts, standing around in those conditions listening to the kind of crap that invariably comes out of Paintballers' mouths in times of stress and disappointment must have seemed like hell on earth. Bob Long's Ironmen and Ground Zero headed the judging staff and their experience told as most games went without a hitch. I say most, because in all tournaments there is controversy mixed with a fair degree of bullshit that at times is hard for the adjudicator to disentangle. Unfortunately, one glaring injustice shone above all else...I shall come to that later. The logistical side of this tournament must be a nightmare, but in this area it succeeded. The games generally ran on time, although there were some delays, and there were no major problems with the actual running of the competition. However, I still think more attention needed paying to the 'customers'. In this case, whether you were in the guise of a player or a vendor, the customer was deprived - through lack of imagination and consideration of the finer points - of value for money. Common sense and consideration took a back seat as the bus headed toward Profitsville, NJ. It's no good saying, 'next year is gonna be better,' people paid good money for THIS year. Anyway, enough of all that, onto the competition itself.

There were over 80 teams in attendance for the 10-Man, five or six of which had a reasonable chance of lifting the first place Pro trophy. The NPPL season thus far had been a roller-coaster, and no one team could be all that confident of winning. Image had stumbled in Portland, along with Aftershock. The rest of the pack, including teams like the All Americans, Dave Youngblood's Ironmen, Lockout, Avalanche and Rage, all lined up like a pack of hyenas, ready to ravage their way through what they perceived as weakened opponents. As far as we were concerned the first two games were paramount. This was because there has always been a certain fear factor when teams play against us, they know we will hit them hard, no matter who they are, but the recent result in Portland had maybe shown a weakness that other teams could exploit. The bubble now having been burst, it was open to speculation as to whether our opponents would have lost that fear and respect. Our first two games went to plan; in fact out first three games totalled no more than eight minutes playing time. This told all who were looking what they ;wanted to know - or, in most cases, what they didn't want to know. Qualification to the semis for the top teams at the World Cup is always a nervous time, with one slip too many depositing you on the wrong side of the scoreboard. After the first round the most obvious casualty was Avalanche, one of the pre-tournament favourites. They'd been rockin' in the 5-Man and taken the World Championship, so everyone expected great things in the 10-Man event. Every competition has its casualties and this was no exception, but it doesn't make it any easier when the hand of fate selects your team to be the patsy and then ;you have to walk the gauntlet of ridicule and self-doubt for the rest of the proceedings. It was a lonely time for all those Avalanche players.

There were two UK pro teams here, the Predators and NWC. The Preds were in our qualifying group and had found the going tough; their last game was against us on the Hyperball field. To add a twist of irony to this game, three of the Preds were in fact team-mates of mine from Shockwave in the UK, who were guesting. There is little sympathy in Paintball once the judge has called game on, and within five minutes they were all eliminated in the consummation of Aftershock's arrival into the next round. I talked to one of my Shockwave players after the game and asked him what he thought. His words were telling: 'I got to my bunker and had to duck because of the sheer volume of paint coming in at me. I thought 'how the hell am I going to get up to shoot' and then all of a sudden someone bunkered me. Not much I could do really.' Just about summed that game up I thought. NWC faced similar difficulties but had qualified by the merest of margins, one point ahead of Avalanche. The path thus far for NWC had been hard, real hard, and they knew deep down that to go any further in the competition would require divine intervention. They had played extremely well and kept British Paintball firmly in second place behind the Americans - everything from now on would be a bonus. Their faces told the whole story; while pleased at getting to the semis, the harsh reality of what lay ahead began to leech into the very fabric of their confidence. Brave faces on pragmatic heads made an uneasy spectacle. Still, the semi-final placings looked reasonable enough: in one group we had All Americans, Rage, Dave Youngblood's Ironmen and Image. This group bore all the hallmarks of unpredictability in terms of who would qualify; basically, it was open to anybody. Most people quite rightly would have had Image, last year's World Cup Champions, as favourites to head this group - or at least to qualify. Qualify they did, but with no little controversy. Not, may I add, by their own doing, but by a more providential intervention, that of the Head Judge, Bill Cookston. For those of you who don't know him, I will say this much about Bill; he is in my experience a man of integrity, hard working and, in my opinion at least, always aspiring to be impartial and just in his decision making. Nobody wants his job but many line up to criticise when they think an injustice has been done and this, I'm afraid, is what I am going to do.

I will now try and explain the 'glaring injustice' I mentioned earlier in this article. In the game between the All Americans and Image, it came down to a two-on-two. One of the All Americans slid into a bunker and eliminated one of Image. Image's last player was also eliminated and the game was all over bar the shouting. For reasons best known to himself, a judge then bounded across the field, deciding that a mark on the arm of the All American player was a hit and that the player he shot out must be put back in. So far, so good, you might think, but then up popped Rowdy from Bob's Ironmen. Rowdy was also reffing on the field; he saw everything that went down and knew that the mark on the All American's arm was nothing more than a smudge that he had seen him pick up as he slid into the bunker. From here on in farce descended into farce, with the decision going this way and that. Eventually, the game went to Image. Leastwise as they walked off the field it was, until a reasoned argument from Adam Gardner backed up with the referees' testimony reversed the decision, and the game was rightly awarded to the All Americans. I say rightly, because whichever way I looked at what went on, the points belonged to the All Americans. One particular judge had other ideas and probably other motives, and this then became fertile ground for some Image representatives to cultivate. The All Americans' victory was posted on the scoreboard and justice was seen to be done...until and unbelievable intervention by Bill Cookston, who reversed the decision, believing he now had a more comprehensive understanding of the proceedings. This was an unprecedented act of reversal, since the scores had already been posted on the board. Bill Cookston did not even see the game and yet felt qualified to alter a decision that had been made at ground level, with all the information assembled before the head field judge. The refs from Bob Long's Ironmen stood (quite rightly) on the moral high ground, arguing against the injustice of this decision, but to no avail. Lunacy ruled the roost in this adjudication and the victims, as ever, were the innocent parties. The All Americans struggled to come to terms with such an outrageous turn of events, packed up their gear and left...an unsavoury end to one team's quest for the Cup.

The final two to go through from this group were Image and Rage. Dave Youngblood's Ironmen need a few more months to tweak their new players into top line performances. The old guard of Brian Bennini, Shane, Marty Bush and Brehene will provide all the experience necessary for them to ensure a rise to the top come the new season. They have a lot of new blood on the team, and if Dave Yongblood decides to play again next year, I believe his inspiration on the field of play will provide them with that elusive catalyst which will transform them into the team of yesteryear. I have neglected thus far to mention one of the hottest teams on the circuit at the moment. Lockout. They have proved beyond any doubt that they are the new team on the block. After turning Pro half way through the year they have qualified for every NPPL final - a remarkable achievement. Even more remarkable is that they seem to have no enemies or detractors. Everybody likes these guys and rightly so: they are self-effacing, modest eager to learn and have no egos. Everything that the existing Pro teams are not. And yet they attract no criticism from other Pros, only praise and respect. The only thing these guys are scared of is a bar of soap. Well, we like them but we had a score to settle from Portland. In our last game there, they basically ripped us a new asshole. This time was different: from the get-go we began to whittle them down, Renick had crawled down our left tape and tagged a couple of them before running back, repositioning and then sprinting through the middle to bunker their pivotal centre guy. The tuskappottamus got lucky. With Lockout's back broken the hoards of Aftershock ransacked their base for the flag and returned it home amid a sense of retribution. Lockout took their defeat as they take their victories, with laid-back acceptance. They congratulated us all and got on with the job of qualifying. Next up for us were the All Americans II. Within one minute they were four down. In five minutes, they were six down. The rest was cleaning up time this dense field. We had qualified, but still had NWC to play. We could have taken our foot off the pedal but decided to try and keep the momentum going and play NWC as though we needed to beat them to qualify. The UK's sole surviving challengers for the Cup lasted about 10 minutes before the inevitable attack broke through their defences, leaving them helpless amid a rush of marauding yanks (oh, and one Brit) scavenging for the final kills.

We headed our group with Lockout securing the last remaining place in the finals. The final group looked like this: Image, Lockout, Rage and Aftershock. Image had looked unconvincing in the run up to the finals, I don't really know why they were having problems, but having them they were. Lockout, as far as we were concerned, were a broken horse. They were not to under-estimated, but we knew that the beating we handed out to them had taken the wind out of their sails. We owed Rage big time, the last time we met them was in Vegas where they beat us and took top spot...this time would be different. Out first game was on the Hyperball field against Lockout, the judge screamed 'Go, go, go,' and we flew out to our primary cover points with me, Gary and Todd filling the air with Evil paint as the Lockout guys scrambled for their positions. They ran headlong into the streams of fire and three guys bit the dust in the first 10 seconds. Lockout, now three guys down, were on the back-foot with nowhere to go. The paint continued to scream into their positions, allowing our front guys to begin the bunkering. One by one, Lockout's remaining skeleton of players was picked clean by the Aftershock vultures, Ceranski, Williams and Bruno. I think we lost two guys in a game that lasted under five minutes. One down, two to go, Image up next. Image had lost their first game against Rage and needed to win. Since we had had our first win, we knew they would have to come at us. This proved to be their downfall: we set up accordingly and waited. Image played brilliantly, with technical eliminations mounting and the clock ticking, the game drew to its climax...a climax that had its destiny mapped from the beginning. We had set up with Gary Noblett and Todd (Xerox) Adamson as our key defense players; as the Image players aligned themselves for the final push, our guys rallied and awaited their attack. It came and when it did an explosion of fire and shouts erupted from the base area. Player after player could be seen leaving the theatre of fire, first and Image player, then an Aftershock, then another Image. The ensuing carnage as Image poured in to try and secure their first victory left a depleted defence and attack. As the paint cleared, out of the blood-bath came Ceranski and Adamson of Aftershock, flying down the middle of the field to get Image's flag. What they did not see was Tommy Malisczewski still hiding in the middle of the field, trying to take stock of what happened in there. In fact the entire Image assault had been eliminated, leaving Gary to hold the flag base and Ceranski and Todd to go get Image's flag. As Todd wheeled in toward Image's base camp Tommy had moved ominously up behind Billy Ceranski, Bosh! Billy went from a couple of shots to the back. As Todd came out of the base camp with the flag he was met with a hail of incoming, relieving him of his armband. Tommy had to get our flag, but time was running down, he knew that since Aftershock have the first pull, the only way he was going to get any more points on the scoreboard was by shooting any remaining Shock players or returning our flag to his base. Problem was, he had less than a minute to do it in. His cautious moves toward our base, knowing that Gary Noblett awaited him, determined that the clock was the winner and Image failed to score any more points.

This left us in the driving seat as Lockout had beaten Rage on the Sup'Air Ball field in the corresponding game. This set up the final game between us and Rage on the Hyperball field in front of 500 or so people...winner takes all. We went out onto the field and waited and waited and waited. Fifteen minutes passed as the refs waited to begin the games simultaneously - Image against Lockout and us against Rage. I hated every minute of it: I felt sick; I wanted to go home; I didn't want to be there; and yet I knew, were I sitting on the other side of the fence, I would have given my right arm to be on the field. Twenty five minutes had passed of walking around until eventually we could wait no more. Danny Bonura from Rage screamed, 'We gotta get this on!' The judges huddled together and agreed to start the final game, regardless of what the other field was doing. On a personal note, I shall never forget how nervous I was as the seconds ticked away to the start. I could have puked there and then. The judge screamed 'Game on,' once again we flew to our primaries, Gary, myself and Todd provided air cover for the troops as they winged their way down-field. Rage tried desperately to get into their front positions but could not dodge the awaiting rivers of paint falling into their path. Less than 20 seconds gone and once again three of them are down. The assault had begun. Gary Noblett, sensing, with all his years of experience, that he has to underscore every Rage elimination, cried out, 'Three down, 10 up.' Thirty seconds passed, 'Four down, 10 up.' Never before have we heard '10 up' from any of our players, it's not a call we use, but we all knew what he meant. We had 10 guys on the field. Hearing 'four down' screamed across the field was good but to hear '10 up' galvanised the team into a feeding frenzy of Paintball carnage. As the minutes ticked by, so did the body count of Rage, continually reinforced by the '10 up' screams of Gary. My trigger finger was suffering a bout of epilepsy as I poured loader after loader toward the Rage positions and then it began... The near fanatical bunkerings were erupting all over the place and still the '10 up' call revertberated around our ears. It was like being part of a machine that had its destiny already carved out in Paintball history. The end was inevitable as Rage capitulated their hold on the game and surrendered amid a hail of paint and screams as we followed their last man like a pack of bloodthirsty wolves to their dead box. The next few minutes were pandemonium as we celebrated not so much the win but the way we had done it. We mowed them.

Aftershock has its critics and they were all baying at the door after Portland...this has shut them up. You CAN win tournaments playing all-out aggressively, we've done it three times out of the last four World Cups. What has evolved is a new style of play, grafted onto an already aggressive team as the tournament progressed. Neither Renick or the team had designed this new style, it just happened, and the other teams could find no answer to it. Aftershock had undergone a subtle metamorphosis as the games went on, finally consummating this change in the final game. There is absolutely no mileage in me telling you what this change is in our style, you'll have to look and try and work it out for yourself, but it is apparent nonetheless. Then you'll have to try and beat it. Its simplicity is its protection from detection. Aftershock is a peculiar team, it is full of psychopaths, space cadets, brain-dead morons, warthogs, monkeys, hippos, dung beetles, fat bastards called Todd and every other kind of social misfit you could think of, but there is one underlying glue that holds these disparate forces together...unfortunately it is Renick Miller. I say unfortunately because he always asks me to say something nice about him when I write these articles, but I just can't seem to lie that much. However, I will say this much: he can play the game, he has the respect of all the team and he has this unerring ability to captain a team without actually being a captain. I asked him afterwards how on earth he could call himself a captain when he does sod all on the field or off. He answered me by saying that, 'Someone like Adam Gardner of the All Americans is a controller, Bob Long of the Ironmen is a teacher and me, well I just get players around me who can play the game better than me.' This is his philosophy, he gets the best players, the best equipment and gives the team whatever they need to win. A single-minded, somewhat blinkered approach, but after four wins in the World cup and a myriad of other victories in the NPPL and across the world, who can argue with him? In fact, his captaincy is not really that simple, it is a complex personal interaction he has with all the players. His word is final, not in any dictatorial sense but we trust what he says and does.

Thanks.

Whenever I come across to the States there are certain people who help me out in lots of different ways. My thanks go to John and Rita, to Luis for being one of the world's nice guys, to Rob from Extreme Rage and to the guys from Aftershock. To all my friends from Planet and Emily on the scoreboard. To Howie, who's the Guvna ? Oh, and one last thing. Chris Piss, you kept saying something to me as the tournament went on, now let me ask you a question, I played two out of three games in the final and won. Pray tell me, exactly what did you do? Scratch your nuts and watch us...thought so!

Amateur Hour

Ironically the Amateur titles, if you think about for a moment, are more fiercely contested that the Pro. This is because there are more Amateur teams vying for the top spot. There were something like 14 Pros out of 80 or so teams entered , so you can appreciate, that to become the Amateur Champions - or even make the finals - is a great achievement for these up and coming teams.

One such aspiring team is Thunderstruck. They have been cleaning up the titles on various circuits, including taking the prestigious Zap Amateur title last year. We all knew they would do well in the NPPL World Cup but the question was, how well?

They came up with a brilliant 3rd place in the Amateur A category behind Naughty Dogs, who came in 2nd, and the winners of the Amateur A title were Fusion. They won the title by a margin of over 70 points from the 2nd place team, a resounding and well deserved victory from a team that will have to turn Pro if they keep this up.

In the Amateur B's race, we had Outta Control taking the title from 2nd place SOB's , Crush made it into 3rd and P&L Factory team bringing up the rear in 4th place.

Outta Control came outta nowhere to take this title and it is this sort of team that provides the NPPL with genesis-type squads that, with the right management, can evolve into top level sides. With teams like the aforementioned Thunderstruck, Fusion and SOB's all waiting in the wings of the Pros, it looks good for the next couple of years if these sort of teams can continue to inspire all Amateur teams within the NPPL.

PGI would like to congratulate all the Amateur teams who attended, because it's you guys that make the NPPL what it is.

Robbo

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