Intervarsities Part 4: Day One

After the bad nights sleep I was up early to fence Epee. I had a light-breakfast of museli and some toast. I was delighted to see my fellow Epee team members tucking into an enormous fry half-an-hour before we were to start fencing. I managed to scrounge a lift across to the venue from Sonja, so we were over there in two minutes.

Epee, it must be explained is a unknown foreign land to me. I've spent the last 3 years training exclusively in Sabre, the most frenetic and immediate of the weapons. Epee is the aboslute antithesis of sabre, patient, often slow and methodical.

After our warm-up, our first match was against Queens. This was not the Queens of previous years by any stretch of the imagination. Some of the experienced fencers they had previously had left and some of the experienced fencers they still had didn't show up - so they were left with a team of beginners. 10 minutes of them walking on to our epees later and we were finished.

This didn't really work in our favour as our next match was against our main rivals Trinity, who while we had been able to snooze through our first match had been given a good warm-up by a decent UCC team. Colin, our no. 1 epeeist had a disaster, as did I. Aidan carried the team during the match but it wasn't to be enough and I had to endure my only team defeat of the weekend - ugh, how horrible!

Things went according to plan after that. We crusied through most of the rest of the matches, that is until I was faced with Noel from Maynooth. The man will not attack, will not make any offensive action, will not do anything except wait for a definite attack and then parry reposte. My matches against him have always been frustrating as a result. The sheer monolithic boring nature of his tactics always enfuriate me and this match was no exception. I freaked out a little and after one more match, I had had enough of Epee for the day and was subbed out for the more than capable Matthew, who had a blinder for the rest of the Epee.

We finished second in men's epee behind Trinity after our sole defeat to them. As that was happening our women's foilists were cleaning house and destroying all in their wake, including Trinity which on paper seemed like it would be a closer match. It was 1 weapon apiece as we entered Men's Sabre, back to what I do best.

Men's sabre was a cruise for us with myself, Stephen, Julian and Ken tearing lumps from most including a very one-sided match against Trinity. Trinity however were destined to suffer with a weaker men's sabre team. They lost to us, UCC and Royal College of Surgeons (forgetting about the very talented foilist and sabeur, Mohammed). As the day wore on it seemed likely that despite everything, Men's sabre was going to run onto the next day. We were going to have to fence again in the morning, hang-overs and all.

...

The evenings entertainment was exceptional and it was great to get a chance to talk to everyone after being away for a while. The intervarsities Initiation was the usual law-suit-waiting-to-happen drunken slip-fest that it normally is and UCD won the boat-race at a canter (Stephen and Eimear displaying what stunning drunks engineers are).

I took a backseat to the madness for the most part and took the oppurtunity to catch up with people I hadn't seen in ages.

The night just wouldn't stop but at 4am in the residents bar I felt it wasn't going to yield much more and decided to call it a night.