Roses for me was a great experience and a great opportunity for watching sports that I have never seen before. Come Saturday afternoon, I was covering the Mixed Badminton games in the York Sport Arena.
To give a brief description of how Badminton works, because I didn’t know how it worked either! Games are won based on performance across 3 games, ie. Who wins 2/3 games and each game is scored is scored out of 21.
When the leading score reaches 11, the players take a 60 second break and in the 3rd game of the match, players switch sides when the leading score reaches 11.
Throughout the 2 games I was watching, York and Lancaster were evenly matched on their ability. Although at times, York appeared to be in a stronger overall position, particularly in their offensive stance as York regularly dealt Lancaster some devastating hits, giving them the advantage in certain games.
Throughout the first match, York had a strong lead and remained a few points ahead until a few of their offensive attacks cost them and along with the skill of the Lancaster team, led to the final score amounting to 17/21 to Lancaster.
After that match ended, attention turned to the final Badminton match. In terms of their back and forth, York’s ability to smash hits was not as good as the Lancaster offensive and sometimes the shots were delivered with too much force; so much so, that the score for match 2 came to 21/13 to Lancaster.
Come the final game, the ability once again was equally prevalent with the teams quickly getting ahead and then equalising on both sides. From 3 all, Lancaster got a point ahead and then York equalised again.
Lancaster had a strong lead throughout the game, as did York when they took a 16/14 lead, but the final score granted Lancaster the win with 21 points to 19 for York.
