Selection process for EHBPC 2011 23-26.06.2011

Yeah.
It would be too difficult to put 4 tournaments where the most part of Euro community could come for 2011. Maybe 2012.
We could maybe think the stuff 50/50 this year, give one or two slot for firsts places in 2 or 3 majors tourneys, and the rest is selected nationally.
But whitout any european body, it looks difficult to make this happens.

Agreed, it might be too late.

I thought i'd sum up my arguments against a strict geographical qualification system, in the form of questions that cannot be answered in any satisfying way, in my opinion. ( I'm not looking for a gut emotional answer to any of these, which is what i usually get in response to such questions, but something in the form of a policy that can be universally applied. )

1. Do you have to "swear allegiance" to a local or national polo scene for a calendar year or some other period? Who's going to keep track of that (consider that London has way more such organizing capacity as other cities/countries). Can Cosmic Todd qualify as a Dutch player? Can Rik still play as Rotten Apples (RIP)? Can Guthrie and I still play with DTGP, one of the longest running teams in polo?

2. Are you not allowed to have a player on your team from outside your region? That would kill 50% of the best teams in North America. This cross-breeding/cross-pollinating is what is driving the skill level in our sport, and it will suffer if it's tied to local cities or regions or countries. We've finally started to see some of these multi-city top-level teams recently in Europe at the BFF tourneys and it sounds like it's been awesome. (Football makes a good comparison, where club play is where the sport evolves, not national teams.).

3. Does your team need to remain the same between tournaments? Which tournaments? What happens if someone gets hurt or doesn't have enough cash to travel? Think about how much drama you have in London when someone needs a sub for a league match. Shit what happens when TWO players get hurt? Most of these questions get answered on a case-by-case basis, which works somewhat at the local level, but gets more and more complicated as we scale up.

4. What if you're the best player in your country but you have to miss your nat'l championships? No EHBPC or WHBPC for you? What if you're Pierre from DTGP, you break your wrist the day before the French championships, and don't qualify? (oh yea, you go to NAHBPC, get top ten, then go to WHBPC and get top ten).

Are the answers to these questions above necessarily the same for all countries? Or is each country allowed to come up with its own system? What if the UK says you can't qualify via the UK if you've already tried qualifying as a Dutch or German player (i'm thinking Todd/Rik), but the Netherlands decides that it's cool, you can be promiscuous with your polo citizenship?

1. Finally, How many teams per country? Clément did what i thought was a killer job last year given the circumstances, but it was pretty arbitrary and therefore the source of plenty of bitching and whining. It's going to be that much harder this year, with more countries. Also, what if you live in a country with incompetent people who run the nat'l bike polo scene, or run it in some corrupt way?
   
   

In short, i'm of the opinion that drama/controversy shouldn't be outsourced from the regional level to the city level, or from the global level to the national level. Let's keep that shit at the highest levels of the sport where it belongs, and base it on skill level not citizenship.

"Maximum damage, minimum scandal", right?