Tourney: UK Championships 2012 - Birmingham - 30 June/01 July

Hey y'all, just catching up with various threads having been away in busy non polo land for a while.

The 2 out of 3 rule was discussed and decided on in respect to the EHBPC qualifiers and we thought that it would be appropriate to use that for the UK Champs too.

There were two main reasons for specifically leaving it as 2 players based in the UK (IE one foreign player per team technically allowed).

1: In order to progress polo at the highest level it is no bad thing that players from different countries combine to play in regular teams. Last year Brendan and Marc Sich were on a team together and it would have been harsh to exclude them from the UK Champs on the basis of Marc not playing regularly in the UK, despite playing on a team with B. Therefore to allow for such another scenario we thought that having 2 UK based players was fair enough.

1. As it is the UK Champs everyone will be playing who can, therefore leaving the possibility of a top quality team having to choose a weaker sub and potentially getting a lower place in the rankings, unrepresentative of their true level. A good example of this situation has come up in the qualifiers with Cosmic struggling to get top players to sub and therefore having to settle with a lower quality sub (i.e me. Though in this case no one who was playing in another euro qualifying tournament was allowed to sub). Therefore we left it open for the possibility of teams getting similar standard players in where its necessary
   
   

It was said at the time that it would be a technically legal but ever so slight dick move to bring in a superstar player as a replacement but in the case of Dead Rappers, I feel that, with all the top players playing at the UK Champs already, DR were fair enough in replacing one of the best players in the UK (B) with one of a similar standard (Mo).

Anyway, maybe tl;dr but that was the basic reasoning behind the rule and imo luca and emmet havent made a dick move unless theyve willfully ignored a crop of top UK players who are teamless for the UK champs...