BRD Blog 2 - BRD vs Croydon – That was a massacre, wasn’t it?
“Roller Derby – that’s like hockey, isn’t it?” asked my colleague.
Luckily, my roller derby friend and colleague was sitting next to me and could intervene. No, roller derby is a contact sport played on roller skates and involving two teams skating around a track. Our colleague thought more about this and then said –
“But you do hit each other with sticks, don’t you?”
Bridgend Roller Derby Team (#BRD) were playing Croydon on Saturday and in my role as Official Team Blogger, I was able to attend, even though it was a ‘closed match’ and therefore not open to the public.
This time I managed to avoid arriving far too early (see previous blog) and was standing at the entrance to the sports hall in Bryncethin with most of the set-up already done. I stood there for a minute or two wondering what to do before a referee approached me and asked if I was a spectator.
Tempting as it was to say ‘Don’t you know who I am?’, the risk of the answer ‘no’ was too great and I explained my role as team blogger. I must sort out a proper team top. He directed me to seating on the far side of the hall.
The advantage of being sent over to a far corner was that I ended up sitting with the scorers. That same conversation at work about roller derby players hitting each other with sticks also included my colleague’s incredulity that the sport needed seven referees per match. It must seem curious to some that when football has endless arguments about the presence of a ‘fourth official’ and cricket refers things to a ‘third umpire’, that roller derby has seven. All I can say is that when a lot is happening quickly and in different locations on the track, you need a group of people to keep up with it.
Luckily, I found myself sitting next to a small child. I am still a novice with the rules and I thought that if anyone declared ‘why, even a small child could understand this!’ then I would be able to ask the small child to explain it to me. Unfortunately, he was more interested in playing a snooker simulation on his phone. Ah, I know what you are thinking, this is typical gender stereotyping going on here. Boys and men like games that involve skill, thought and concentration whereas girls and women are just naturally competitive, aggressive creatures that have to play contact sports which have the potential for injury and violence. You cannot do anything about it, it is just biology.
Irony aside, I also realised that sitting among the scorers gave me a unique view on the game, match, bout, encounter, scrim ... still not sure on the terminology. As BRD went into a huddle for motivation purposes, so the scorers gathered in a circle and although there were no chants (Go scorers! Go scorers! Scorers, scorers, do your maths!), there was a motivational speech from the head scorer and briefing on how the scores would be communicated and written up. They were scoring with paper and pencil, by the way, which was refreshingly old school (though the match was taking place in the sports hall of an old school).
The scores were to be written up on a small scoreboard and I soon realised that I was sitting behind this and therefore would not know what the score was at any point. I am pleased to say that I guessed early on that Bridgend were building a lead, but I did also realise the best viewing tactic was being shown by the man sitting on my left (the boy was on the right). He asked what the score was and, being told that Bridgend were in the lead, said, “I thought so”. Every time I ask for the rules to be explained, I shall respond with a knowing, “I thought so”.
If you think of the track as one large oval which the teams skate around anti-clockwise then the referees inhabit the inner circle. A referee follows the ‘lead jammer’ for each team (the team member trying to get past everyone else to score points) and skates around the inner circle holding up a hand to show how many points that jammer has scored. At the end of each ‘jam’, the scorers hold up a hand with the same number of fingers raised as the referee to show that they know how many points to allocate. My knowledge of how all this works remains shaky but I will note that when a jammer scores nothing, the referee holds up a fist and the scorer holds up their fist to acknowledge it. For those of us with political knowledge, it looks as though the two are exchanging a black power salute, which is a little bizarre.
The intriguing thing about watching the referee’ing is that you become aware that roller derby has much in common with other sports. There was a point where one of the Croydon team received a pretty hard shoulder barge and then she clutched her face and looked hopefully at the referee. She could make it as a footballer with those skills. I still have no idea what constitutes a legal bit of violence and what constitutes an illegal bit of violence but there were a lot of people being sent off the track temporarily for illegal moves. I wonder what happens if the referees send off all of one team. I wonder what happens if they send off all of both teams?
The medical side is clearly taken seriously. There were three breaks in play for a medic to check on a player who had fallen to the ground. I assume that going over backwards (even with the padding and the helmet) is going to be dangerous and I imagine that concussion must be a worry – I am sure that a couple of times I saw a medic shine a torch into someone’s eyes. There did not appear to be any permanent injuries and all the players re-entered the game at a later point. However, the scorer chose to describe the teams as ‘Black’ and ‘Blue’ and, frankly, black and blue was a bit of a theme at some points.
Even sitting behind the scoreboard with a small child who preferred snooker, I could tell that Bridgend were in the lead. Croydon made some progress before half-time, but BRD were back into it in the second half and stretching their lead. Both me and the man who knew what the score was as soon as he had been told it laughed at a couple of plays just because BRD were finding it so easy to rack up points. Frankly though, Croydon started to look beaten.
You know how they talk about teams in other sports just wanting the game to be over? That was how Croydon looked in the last ten minutes of the match/ bout/ game/ contest/ scrim/ jam/ massacre. I watched one player in particular who found herself knocked to the ground regularly and had that look of someone who simply did not want to get up anymore. She just wanted it all to be over. When she was sent off temporarily for an illegal move, she looked relieved. Like any team sport, the psychological advantage is key and as BRD stretched their lead to a hundred and then a hundred and fifty points, you could see that Croydon knew that the only question left was how great the margin of their loss would be.
BRD and Croydon were supposed to have been evenly matched but they really were anything but evenly matched. I may have much to learn about illegal moves and about scoring, but I could tell that the margin of victory showed just how much BRD were improving on their ranking.
My friend who plays for BRD said, “That was a massacre, wasn’t it?”
It was.