IN T' NET

An occasional Basketball Diary ... (from Yorkshire, in case tha'd not noticed)

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26/02/06

As usual the Amaechi Centre proved the perfect hosts for such an event, and they and the fans were treated to an excellent day's basketball, with the bonus of an overtime thriller (in the Patron's Cup) to end with.

I was particularly impressed with the support for East Kent Crusaders. Despite having the furthest distance to travel they had the largest group of fans for any of the competing teams, having travelled up from deepest Kent the day before, and stayed overnight, ready for the 11.30am tip-off.

The only downside, from my point of view, was that I was beginning to suffer from a very heavy cold, but I managed to keep myself well enough dosed-up to avoid coughing down the microphone too often!

As a result I spent most of Monday crashed out in front of the TV, dozing off and generally feeling sorry for myself. II did think about an early night, but then thought that I ought to at least stay awake long enough to post the key result from Monday night's title-decider in EBL Division 2 South-East. The game was scheduled for an 8.15 tip-off, so at 10.15 I accessed the Results' Voicemail, and again at 10.30, 11 o'clock .... until finally Towers phoned it in at seven minutes past midnight!.

So much for the early night.

26/02/06

25/02/06

On Saturday I headed North up the A1 for 100 miles, for Durham Wildcats' crunch fixture against Bradford Maroons. A very exciting game it was, too, with the usual enthusiastic crowd, and the home side leading for most of the game. Going into the final minutes the Wildcats held a six point lead, which would be just enough to keep alive their hopes of a play-off berth in their first season. That was until the Maroons put on a spurt at the end, taking the last eight points of the game, to snatch victory and secure their own qualification.

At least the Voicemail was behaving itself, so it didn't take me long to collect and post the results from the early evening before heading back home, to finish the process, a couple of hours later, with the results of the later evening matches.

The following day I was heading in exactly the opposite direction - 50 miles South down the M1, to Nottingham. Fortunately I always leave home early whenever I'm working at a game, partly to make sure that I'm there ready to get set up in plenty of time, and partly to give me time to collect and post a few results before the game starts.

Imagine my surprise (and embarrassment), as I turned in through the gates at Nottingham Trent University at 2.45, when my phone rang and an anxious voice asked "Where are you? It's 3 'clock tip-off today!"

So much for set-up time, and dealing with results before the game! Needless to say, we dispensed with the usual pre-game team introductions.

As it turned out, I wasn't entirely to blame (although I had missed spotting the tip-off change on the EB website fixture list on Friday). It was a late decision to alter the start time, and referees and table officials had only been told on the Thursday or Friday. A pity that no-one thought to let the announcer know!

At least the earlier tip-off time on Sunday meant that I was able to get home before picking up the rest of the day's results!

I'm up in Spennymoor again on Saturday (today), and then tomorrow I'm over in Manchester for the Cup Finals - which start at 11.30am.

As my Dad used to say, "If they called it work, you wouldn't do it".

The majority of teams know what they're doing, and do their best to be as prompt, clear and accurate as possible, but as in most walks of life it's the awkward buggers who take up more than their fair share of time, and who stick in the memory longest.

I know it's a refrain you've heard before, and one that you're probably heartily sick of by now, but what do you make of these few examples from last weekend?

Fortunately several players from the away team are regular visitors to "Pawprint", and they wasted no time in telling me that the score was right, but that it was they who had won! It seems that the third quarter score was the only one the right way round.

This week it's going to go smoothly ... isn't it?

11/02/06

I'm told that the firm which supplies the telephone to the EIS in Sheffield have replaced the voicemail system, so we're looking forward to a trouble-free results service this weekend. Yeah - and I was really pleased with the presents that Santa Claus brought me for Christmas, too.

Actually, there's no way it could possibly be as bad as last week.

I was wrong about the system swallowing messages. What was happening was that as soon as I'd retrieved all the information from one, and deleted it, the voicemail wouldn't recognise that there were any more there. However, next time I connected, there they still were. So, the good news was that we weren't losing any.

The bad news, though, was that we were keeping too many!

It wasn't viable to delete any, as that meant hanging up, and phoning back in again, after each deletion, but no messages were being moving into the "read" folder after I'd listened to them. Normally after a message has been accessed it disappears from the "live" folder into an archive, which is accessed by pressing certain keys; this time all messages remained "live", which meant that every time I phoned in to pick up new scores, I had to scroll through the ones I'd already heard before I reached the first new one.

That was irritating enough to start with, but it became more and more so as the store of messages built up. That's why there weren't any updates at times like half-time in the game at Spennymoor, because it took so long to scroll through the messages I didn't need that I didn't have time to note the new scores, type them up and upload them before the second half began!

At least I was able to post all available scores after I got home, but the problems didn't end there - I then had to spend an hour and a half checking through all the messages to make sure I'd made a note of all the relevant information (such as scorers and split scores). By the time I'd done that, and typed them onto the Bulletin master copy it was 4.00am ... and I had to be up early the next day, to get to the Trophy Finals at Coventry.

To be honest, I was almost relieved when the system crashed completely on Sunday afternoon, and wouldn't allow access at all. At least I was able to put it to the back of my mind, and concentrate on watching two excellent matches!

On the other hand, it meant a lot of phoning round, and of checking e-mails, after I got home, to make sure that we'd picked up as many of the Sunday scores as possible, so it was another pretty late night before I crawled into bed. Hence the lack of many updates during the week ... I can't do without sleep like I once could!

Anyway, many thanks to the teams which went out of their way either to e-mail results, or to check the details and give them to me on the phone. With luck we won't have to go down that route this week.

That said, I really can't understand why we still have seven fixtures from last week for which we still have no scores! You'd think that clubs might notice that the Bulletin says "not available" .... but there are clearly 14 teams to whom that doesn't apply - and several of the missing results that we did get were only picked up when the scoresheets arrived at EB.

Not that this is just a feature of weekends when we have problems with the voicemail. If you look at the various pages of "Season's fixtures", this is where I archive matches which were either Postponed or for which we received no result. It's incredible the number that are still there, waiting for information - many of them from several months ago.

So, this week I'm hoping for a record - no voicemail problems, and every single result phoned in.

04/02/06

 I actually caught the Voicemail in the act this time. Having picked up a couple of early results, and then had a spell when I couldn't get through at all, I got through again, to be told, by the recorded voice, that there were "five new messages". Having picked up the first of them, I pressed "next", only to be told that "there are no new messages in your mailbox",. so it had eaten four of them while I listened to one!

All very frustrating!

Anyway, if you've phoned a result in and it doesn't appear, or if you can't get through to the Voicemail at all, please e-mail (preferably the full result, with split scores [and scorers for senior games], but the final score alone is better than nothing) to webmaster@pawprint75.co.uk .

03/02/06

 I was caught out (again!) this week by a change in regulations that doesn't seem to have received any official publicity. When posting the news of player signing by BBL Clubs this week I assumed that a few that had happened just before the usual registration deadline (of 31st January) were being "drip fed" to the media by BBL, and so were appearing after the deadline.

It turns out, however (and thanks to Glenn Hardaker for drawing my attention to this) that the BBL have extended the deadline for their clubs to 28th February. This has been confirmed to me by EB.

I believe that the reason behind this is that several clubs will be losing players during part of March, for the Commonwealth Games, and so it will give those clubs a chance to add to their rosters to avoid them being too badly disadvantaged while those players are away.

That certainly appears very sensible, and even laudable. So, why has it not been trumpeted from the rooftops? Sensible ideas are rare enough, surely, that any that do come along are worthy of the widest possible publicity. If those of us who try to write regularly about basketball are kept in the dark, how can we ever expect interest in the game to grow?