Who: Dave and Danielle, your hosts with the mosts What: The Quidditch Hour on WSRN When: Monday, April 1, 9 am Where: Anywhere your radio is :) Warnings: Quidditch! OOC Note: As always, please keep an eye on the official tournament bracket! Just one more match to go! ~Calli
DAVE: Hey there, sports fans! Welcome to Quidditch Hour on your local WSRN member station. As always, we are sponsored by Boone's Best Broom Polish: "A dab of Boone's will get you where you need to go." I'm Dave Nguyen, your favorite statistician and all-around Quidditch nerd.
DANIELLE: And I'm Danielle Beauregard, your intrepid newshound and match analyst. Once again I think we're gonna have to start with that Kappas game--
DAVE:THAT. KAPPAS. GAME.
DANIELLE: I know, I know, I was there! Fans, if you blinked and missed it yesterday, WSRN will be replaying the full broadcast after our show today. All thirty-nine minutes and sixteen seconds of it. Is that anywhere close to a record for the shortest tournament game, Dave?
DAVE: Interestingly, it doesn't even make the top ten. The nature of tournament play does tend to lead to shorter matches, as only wins matter in the single-elimination postseason, and teams have less incentive to wait and rack up the points before snitchgrab than they do during the regular season when rankings are determined by point totals. And as we saw yesterday, that strategy along with a seeker with a keen eye and great reflexes can give us incredible upsets.
DANIELLE: That's right. The Haileybury Hammers, giants of the league, ranked second only after the unbeatable Roanoke Riptide, were heavily favored in this match. With their brutal beating game and a nearly-perfect-season seeker in D'Angelo Berry, they've made a formidable foe for the underdog sixth-ranked Kappas all year, and beat them handily in both of their meetings in the regular season. And they got off to a quick start, scoring nine goals in the first thirteen minutes of gameplay and only giving up one. Just over half an hour in the score stood at 130 to 10. And then...
DAVE:AND THEN! Hammers chasers Rock Hayden and Magnus McCaffrey both got tangled up with Kappas chaser Opal Zhang near the Kirkland hoops. While everyone's attention was on that mess and the refs were still trying to sort out which fouls to call and on who, Kappas seeker Lennox Campbell did this casual little turn, reaching over his shoulder, and that was it -- the whistle blew and the mighty Hammers have fallen. Did you even see the snitchgrab, Danielle?
DANIELLE: Not until the replay, Dave. A shocking quick end to a short, brutal match. So the perennial underdog Kappas are through to next week's final, to everyone's amazement. Kirkland has struggled all season with injury and lack of cohesion, and even with captain Hideko Nakamura back in for the tournament to lead the chaser line after a month's missed matches during his bout of vanishing sickness, we didn't see a great game out of the Kirkland seven. Or I should say out of the Kirkland six, because seeker Campbell saved this match for them single-handedly. Literally.
DAVE: Absolutely, which always makes fans either delighted or furious. The Hammers are unquestionably the superior team, but that's the game, isn't it? This one has already revived that perennial debate among NAQL fans over the snitch, whether it's worth too many points, whether it should even exist, whether the game would be purer without it. A little later we're going to speak to Jacqueline Strike, retired national chaser for Canada, current Quidditch ref, and author of the new book The Points Are Too Damn High: The Case Against the Golden Snitch about the "Ditch the Snitch" movement in the sport, which has been gaining traction worldwide in the past decade. Some interesting points on both side of that debate.
DANIELLE: But before we get to that, let's look at our other semifinal match of the weekend. Saturday saw the NAQL's reigning champs, the undefeated Roanoke Riptide, meeting the fifth-ranked Moose Jaw Meteorites. The big news of the week, of course, was Riptide starting beater Nola Thibodeaux's shocking and much-protested arrest after a raid on her New Orleans home last Monday night for possession of banned recreational potions. That case is ongoing and we can't speculate on it, but it meant that the 'Tide were playing in a tournament match with their reserve, eighteen-year-old Danny Herrera, who's only played in three matches all season.
DAVE: We did see the Vegas bookmakers adjust their books after that news broke, but Roanoke were still heavily favored, and we saw no upset there. That chaser frontline of Pierce, Holloway, and Nguyen were on fire. Did captain Raz Holloway actually score fifteen goals in the first half hour or did it just seem that way?
DANIELLE: It actually took him thirty-eight minutes. So about as long as a Kappas match. I was impressed with how well Herrera slotted in in Thibodeaux's absence, but of course, that's that Riptide magic at work. We've spoken at length about how general manager Sylvana Woods has put together this electric young team with such a deft touch. Every player seems to complement every other player -- there are no weak links, and between that always-electric famous chaser line, a steady barrage from beaters Herrera and Toby Wright, and keeper Jupiter Mills' solid defense, the Meteorites never seemed to have possession long enough to put up the points they would have needed to be a contender in this one. I will say, considering how much time Roanoke spent in possession of the quaffle, it's impressive how well Moose Jaw managed to make their shots count. Jacques de la Salle, the veteran chaser who's been with the Meteorites for thirteen years and is still going strong, really shone with that shot percentage, and I think Moose Jaw fans can feel proud of the fight their team put up against a team who have been unstoppable all season.
DAVE: I definitely think there's a lot to admire there, yeah. So can we talk about that seeker matchup? When we chatted about it last week, you and I were both looking forward to this first-ever meeting between the Meteorites' new seeker, Jonny Sherwood, the boy wonder from down under, and reigning champ Aleks Ivanov. Both young seekers, both high-energy, both remarkably talented. Was it everything you dreamed of?
DANIELLE: And more, Dave, and more. It was honestly hard to look away from those two and their -- should we call it a seekers' dance? It was beautiful. It was acrobatic. It was sexy--
DAVE: O-okay, let's keep this family-friendly. Anyway, it didn't come down to the snitch, but that final race was incredible anyway -- an explosive acceleration, a heart-stopping flat-out dive, and Sherwood came up just a fingertip short as Ivanov came up with the prize. At a final score of 520 to 180, to no one's surprise, Roanoke advances to the finals for the second year running.
DANIELLE: We'll look at that final matchup toward the end of the show, so don't change that dial, fans. Now, let's welcome Jacqueline Strike into the studio to talk about the "Ditch the Snitch" movement and her new book, The Points Are Too Damn High: The Case Against the Golden Snitch...