SPL Tournament Review

Here is the review for 20th edition of my Fifa Tournaments, the SPL Tournament. I hope you enjoy it!

So starting off in the first of two groups and this one was by far the hardest with Kent, Sideshow, JAG, Monica, Viva and Marky all contesting. Kent demonstrated his ‘group of death’ expertise by beating every one of his opponents some narrowly like Side and JAG, and some not so narrowly like Marky. He got the job done and finished first.

For the rest it wasn’t so easy, three points separated 2nd from 6th and they all took points off each other. Having Celtic may have just tipped the balance in Viva’s favour beating champion Sideshow, edging past JAG and drawing with Marky was good enough to get 2nd. Not inspiring, but good enough. Monica was only managing to draw his games but with four qualifying spots this wasn’t so bad if he could at least get a victory to his name which he did when he impressively beat Viva 5 – 2 meaning he got the 3rd place finish.

Now the story of the group was Sideshow struggling with his Dundee team. Uncharacteristic losses to Viva and more shockingly Marky resulted in a real struggle to get even fourth and with only a solitary win against JAG he needed to beat Monica which he failed to do. A draw wasn’t enough and he finished 5th in the group becoming only the second defending champion to exit at this stage. JAG would prop up the table having a similar poor tournament with narrow losses to Kent and Viva costing him. So the real winner of the two fates of Side and JAG was Marky whose five points were enough to see him take 4th spot and a shot at glory in the quarter-finals.

Group B the group for the less faint of heart, or so it appeared when Tyke, Saggy, 1man, Kanga, Obers and Trebs contested this one. I normally start at the top but I’ll start at the bottom for this one by mentioning Trebs who went through the entire group phase without victory and made it three whole tournaments without a victory, meaning he not surprisingly finished bottom.

Bit more interesting for the rest as Tyke, 1man and Saggy all made their marks on the group. Tyke finished top with 12 points winning all apart from a loss to the impressive 1man. Saggy finished third drawing unimpressively with Obers and losing to Tyke. The story of the group though was the man sandwiched between them, 1man in 2nd who notched up victories against Trebs, Kanga, Obers and Tyke to seal his first ever qualification out of the group stages.

Another first would come in the form of Obers whose plucky draws against Kanga and Saggy along with the win against Trebs gave him 5 points and due to Kanga’s failure to take points from any of the top three it would be Obers who squeezed through in fourth leaving Kanga in fifth. Obers was about to take his place in the knock-outs for the first time!

CONTINUED IN FIRST POST