Meetball hits the beach

After a fantastic 2015-16 football season on astroturf which saw Ratio crowned winners back in May, we took our teams to the beautiful Canford Cliffs beach to see if that mixed things up a little!

So, after 7 weeks of beach football practise, a quick shuffle around of dates and some very last minute organising (due to circumstances out of our hands), 6 teams met on the beach on Thursday 21st July to battle it out to see who would become the 2016 Beach Meetball Champion!

The 6 teams playing included players from more than 12 agencies and included (other than ourselves); Adido, Appius, Folk, Base, Bright Blue Day, Greenwood Campbell, Media Lounge, Salad Creative, The Light Side and Three Straight Lines.

We introduced a new award this year entitled the ‘Team Spirit Award’ and teams began to compete for this before even arriving on the beach - with some impressive team ‘press-conferences’ and ‘player interviews’ as well as some peeks at the new kits (most of which you can see on our twitter page or #meetball16).

As teams began to arrive, new kits were unveiled and players began to size each other up, the camaraderie was high and after a quick overview of the rules and explanation of the evening by our brilliant Andy Brown, games got underway.

Tweaking standard beach football rules slightly, we kept games to a more manageable 2x 5-minute halves and each team played every team once. Keeping score of each game and including the goal difference, this resulted in a final table of results. With one game to go, Andy read out the table as it stood and with Adido the far and away leaders at this stage. 2nd place was still all to play for though with 3D FD, Media Lounge and Greenwood Campbell vying for second place!

As competition ran high, Greenwood Campbell held it together to win their match and made it through to the Final to play Adido.

The 3rd and 4th teams in the table then played, with 3D FD winning that match against Media Lounge (with a final minute that resembled Accrington Stanley’s recent game vs Wimbledon here) and it was onto the final.

It was a hard fought match and played over 3 sections of 5 minutes it definitely tested the stamina of the 2 teams playing. Finally and with plenty of cheering from the brilliant crowd of supporters who came along to support their teams, Greenwood Campbell were crowned the winners!

After a quick chat with our formidable referee team of Steve Fall and Steve Currie, Adido were also presented with the Team Spirit Award for their friendly banter both and before and during the tournament, their fair play attitude to football and their encouragement of other teams.

Thank you to everyone who joined in and to all the supporters who came along and congratulations again to Greenwood Campbell and Adido!