Tuesday, 30 September 2008

Thoughts from a Beijing NPC: Peter Czerniewski (Seniors)

In the Seniors, we are fielding the same team that played in the European Championships in June: David Price - Colin Simpson, Chris Dixon - Victor Silverstone, Ross Harper - Andrew Thompson with Peter Czerniewski NPC.

All three pairs have worked hard since then and we have also held a couple of training days including playing, slam biding (which let us down a bit in Pau), and coaching from David Burn. Our objective is to win a medal in Beijing.

Our first task is to get through the round robin by occupying one of the first 8 places (out of 17). We are confident we should be able to do that, but there is a significant advantage in finishing in the top 3 because you get a choice of round-of-16 opponents, so we will be gearing our efforts to that. We think our main rivals in our qualifying group are likely to be USA, Sweden, France, and Denmark, but there are some other teams we don't know so well (such as Brazil, Hungary, New Zealand) who could also turn out to be strong. We play USA (probably our strongest opponents) in the third match of the first day.

From the round of 16 we will be playing long knock-out matches. We obviously don't know who we will be playing, but we would expect to see teams such as Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Indonesia, and China in the knock-out rounds.

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