Wow, what a great event. See now you don’t HAVE to read the rest of this blog post. You know the most essential fact. However, if you would care to come with me on a journey into the cold dark heart of a holiday village on the south coast of Ireland I will explain to you just what made it such a good time.
There’s not been many event going on recently for some reason, last couple of years it has been almost like we haven’t been allowed to travel, meet up and breath heavily in the company of of close, dear friends in HMA. In Ireland this year so far there have been a couple of tournaments which I attended and reviewed elsewhere. The Cork Blademasters organised the most recent one The Blademasters open 2022 on this weekend just passed.
It has been on the schedule since much earlier in the year and I was actually the first person to book. I know, I’m such a simping fanboy… Andrzej, the head instructor, always organises thing impeccably and has a great international network to make sure the word get out to everyone.
I am currently conflicted as to whether I will address this review thematically or chronologically. It’s a stylistic choice that has implications for ease of writing and how you, dear reader, experience the thing. Hmm, give me a moment.
Friday
The road trip from here to there is about three hours, given a minor detour to collect my fellow Peasants. I brought two of the club; Bertie one of our newest members making the bold step of attending his first ever HMA event and Freddie, a more seasoned member who has made a few trips to events and tournaments by now. Drive was good but ye don’t care about that and I respect you for it.
We got the place about 1pm, the hall had been available for free sparring since 9.30am and people had been putting it to good use judging by the funk wafting out of the fire exit, thrown wide in a desperate effort to ventilate the place on a hot sunny day. We weren’t able to go direct to our rooms so we offloaded some kit and started saying hello to people. The hall was a decent size, three rings marked out, space for kit, sparring and chatting. There was a coffee bar in the building so it was practically ideal.
There was loads of people there, our great friends the Blademasters (of course, too many to single out but great company), a raft of European visitors from France, Italy, UK, Hungary, Poland, Malta and a couple from over the big water to our West. Louisiana is a long way and we were really glad to welcome them over to join in the fun.
For me the most solid contacts I had with the international crowd was the club from Malta. They all wore the same colour jackets and socks, a gorgeous bright blue. I love to see that kind of team identity, they were all there together and they supported each other wonderfully. The genuine happiness and congratulations they expressed when one of their members won the beginners’ longsword tournament was a pleasure to behold. Also they made for great company and conversation during the inevitable beer fuelled evening. But don’t let me jump ahead too far.
The afternoon activities kicked off with a class by Nathan Featherstone on Irish stick fighting. It was really interesting, stick fighting was presented in simple clear terms that made sense to a HMA head and made me realise a good few things about body mechanics and faction fighting tactics that I will endeavour to put to good use in the car-park of Lidl when toilet paper next runs short.
After that (which I think pretty much everyone joined), there were two concurrent classes. One was for beginners, looking at coached sparring, how to spot areas for development and how to approach a tournament. The other was for advanced coaching, how to develop as a more experienced fencer. I cannot honestly tell you much about either as I schnuck off to settle into the accommodation and stuff an extremely over-priced burger into my face. It had been a long drive with not enough sustenance.
Whilst I am proceeding chronologically I think this is a perfect time to discuss the accommodation and facilities in general. I’ll get back to the main timeline in a moment. The venue was Trabolgan Holiday Village. It’s a family holiday camp site and certainly not my ideal holiday destination. Don’t get me wrong, the sports hall was perfect, the location by the sea was nice and the little houses were clean and dry. It’s just I get overwhelmed by a weird dystopian despair when surrounded by rows of identical houses, sat in a very condensed ‘village plaza’ eating processed food listening to enthusiastic teenagers attempt to energise herds of bored looking toddlers. Maybe it’s childhood trauma, maybe we’ll never know.
The evening was a sort of return to the first week of university living on a campus. Strange, barely decorated rooms, pizza for dinner, cheap beer and a desire to socialise with strangers no matter the cost. Anyway,once all the classes were done and enough time to rinse off had been allowed we grabbed a few beers in a bag and headed out. Like freshers we had high hopes of finding people we might recognise and who might be cool and let us hang out with them for a while. As we stepped out of our back door we immediately spotted a couple of lads swinging swords on their patio. Target acquired.
We spent a great evening with the guys up from Dublin HEMA and Nathan (the stick fighting dude) discussing History, archaeology and some crazy technique queries from newer fencers. Some of those queries led to decent discussion, but some led to head scratching and “…well, I suppose it’s possible, but it’s just not likely”.
Saturday
The previous night came to a close at 1.30am or so, quite respectable I thought. Breakfast for the Peasants involved banana and pizza as that was all we had brought with us. The day was going to kick off at 10am or so with the Beginners Synthetic Longsword which Bertie had entered.
Even the best synthetic is a poor substitute for steel. Bertie has been working with steel pretty much since the second or third class he took and he is actually less familiar with synthetic. This meant that for the first couple of exchanges he (to his credit) went in looking for the bind, unaware that synthetics don’t play that game. He got to grips with it soon enough and we were able to corner for him which was hopefully helpful. I feel a bit conflicted as a corner, I want to be there to advise but I want him to fight his own fight his way, I want to point out what he’s doing wrong when necessary but don’t want to knock his confidence. It’s a strange role for me to be honest. I have been told by more experienced hands that the thing to do is: “When they are doing something that works, tell them to do more of it, when they are doing something that doesn’t tell them to stop.”
Results wise, Bertie did alright for a first tournament, finishing 10th in the pools but not making it through to the second round. Every day is a school day and every tournament even more so. I think Bertie’s performance was great and he’s improving all the time so by this time next year he’ll be even better!
The tournaments had a novel enough structure (for Ireland anyway). There was a round of pools where you accumulated points against the other in your group, then the top [insert number based on size of competition] go through to another round of pools and continue to accumulate points. There is no final as such, just a second chance to accumulate points. It looks like the points from the first round are kept in the second which is not how I’d do it but I will come back to that later.
There was a Women’s Steel competition, but with only two entrants. As the tournament used HEMA Scorecards and the rules are put in place before the day it meant that the two women fighters had to fight each other twice, once in the ‘pools’ stage and again in the second round. Then they both got medals! It would have been great to see a larger field in the women’s event as the fencing quality was excellent. They both fought in the open as well, so got a couple more bouts than most.
After lunch was the Open Steel, Freddie and I (that’s grammatically correct in this situation not just me tryna sound posh) were in different pools. There were seven pools but only three rings, meaning that I got to watch all Freddie’s matches long before I had to even kit up. Freddie has really taken to the scholarly vibe of the sport. He’s done a lot of reading and listening to podcasts and has developed some fine ideas on fencing techniques that I certainly didn’t teach him but instead try to learn from him. His fine movements to parry from Pflüg served him well, quick thrusts and solid cuts giving him a solid base of points.
The tournament had the standard Blademasters’ points system. If you are hit then you can take a single step when attempting an after-blow. There is no actual time limit so this puts the pressure on the initial striker to get out safely once they have scored. They can step back quickly or just be ready to block your return strike. We suffered with this the first time we saw it and Cork definitely benefited as they trained the system in their club. At this event I think both Freddie and I made the most of the system, we reduced the value of strikes on us and even managed to take advantage by striking with a deep after-blow in response to a low scoring hit. With the weighting of the target values this meant that we could turn a three point loss (from a hand hit, say) into a two point gain by striking the head (five points) and having the difference awarded in our favour.
In my pool I went in with some intentions. I wanted to be invested in success enough to get me focussed and doing good fencing, but not so much that when I (more than likely) didn’t get a shiny medal, my heart would not be broken. I set my self tactical, technical and strategic targets instead. Basically I wanted to:
- Get at least one aggressive Vorschlag that controlled my opponents blade in and score high with it (basically take some initiative and come straight out of my corner, striding like a monster across the ring and off the bat hit them in the head, classy). That’s tactical.
- Do a Durchwechseln, in the classic sense of offering a bind and then when my opponent goes for it swap to the other side of their blade and stab them (the HEMA equivalent of offering a handshake and then whipping you hand up through your hair at the last second). That’s technical.
- Stay happy with fencing for the whole pools, sounds easy but I am prone to getting salty. Either my own performance or calls going against me can ruin my mood and that is no fun. I wanted to keep my mood positive even if I messed the odd thing up or the blind bastard of a ref (jk Mike) missed a clear point in my favour. That’s strategic – it’s a stretch but if I lose the mood then I will certainly lose more fights, more loss of mood more loss of fights, so I call that a strategy, even if it is an emotional one.
It’s not a lot to ask and setting the bar where I did meant that I was likely to succeed. Make possible things your dreams.
In my first bout I failed to score more than two points, I never landed a blow that I tried and my opponent literally drove me from the ring after hitting me in the face and before I could even react. Wow, what a great fencer! It actually didn’t get me that annoyed as I watched him do exactly the same thing to everyone else in the pool. When you are outclassed, you’re outclassed and you might as well get angry with the size of the raindrops. Bence from Hungary actually managed to score a total of 83 points from four bouts. Each one is capped at 20 points but technically if you were on 19 you could get up to 24 if your last hit was a deep target for five points. He actually scored the lowest against me at 20 points but I have literally no idea how that happened.
The other bouts in my pool were much more satisfying, I managed all my intentions. I managed to win all the other bouts and finished second in the pool but with a much more modest total of 60 points. Some of the bouts were really close especially my rematch with Alex Bourdas were I only managed to win by a single point.
In the final analysis Freddie and I ranked 11th and 10th respectively, putting us in the top third of the table but not high enough to qualify. We had acquitted ourselves admirably but the field was of such a high quality that we weren’t able to progress. Watching the rest of the pools I got to see some real variety of styles, Bence is a Fiorist so he stood out quite clearly, others ranged from the fast and technical to the brutish and scrappy. Good fun to watch and wonderful to see that level of fencing in Ireland!
Once the dust had settled Bence actually won first place so I really had no problem losing to him in our pool.
Saturday evening was a bit more intensely social with a meeting at the Trabolgan Plaza pub for drinks. The social aspect of HMA events are really important to me as they allow networking and the chance to have you ideas challenged or accepted. Not just fencing ideas, there was plenty of discussion about how to run a club, how to teach and learn more effectively and how to improve and encourage inclusivity within the scene. We drank too much and stayed up too late, it was great.
Sunday
The final day was a tricky one, physically anyway. I haven’t been out drinking two nights in a row for longer than I care to remember. I felt tired, hungover and the pizza-burger based diet was starting to take its toll. Still, there was fencing to be done!
The day was planned essentially the same as Saturday just with sabres. Synthetics in the morning and steel in the afternoon.
Bertie had been running through techniques with us over various chats and got a chance to try out some of his methods and did pretty well in his pool, qualifying to the second round and staying off the bottom in the finals as well. A perfectly respectable result as far as I am concerned. Synthetic sabre is a lot slower than the steel. I don’t mean you can take it easy. I mean it’s harder to get the things moving as quickly. They flop about and it’s very hard to maintain the quality if you are used to steel. Bertie did well, took direction from his corner (ahem) well and improved over the course of his bouts. In the second round he did two back-to-back bouts and the second one was excellent. Getting warmed up in the first really made a difference.
Freddie was judging all day as he is recovering from a broken pinkie and didn’t feel up to competition standard. By the end of the day he looked like a zombie, eyes glazed over as flags waved and twitched deep in his occipital lobe.
I had a bit of a wait for my pool so I had time to warm up and stretch. It didn’t really help. I got blown out of most of my bouts, finishing dead last in the pool. I was not sorry. I really wasn’t anywhere near the peak of my game and I didn’t deserve to progress. I enjoyed the bouts themselves, particularly against Adam Gibson from Poland who’s crazy style reminded me of a crazy-eyed Polish friend, so that was a lot of fun.
I tried to learn something, they say if you don’t win then you should at least learn something. I am not sure I succeeded. What I really got from the pool was a severely bruised biceps and a physical workout that can only be called cleansing. I burnt through my hangover nearly as effectively as my opponents burnt through me.
I watched one of the second round pools and I can honestly say that the gulf between my fencing on the day and the eventual winners was astounding. Even at my best, and I think on a good day I could have won my pool, I would have been utterly destroyed in the advanced pool. There was a definite physicality (grappling, brawling) that some guys used that I would have stood no chance against. My personal style just wouldn’t have stood a chance.
The best fencers won, they got the medals they deserved and I think the day was a successful one for almost all concerned.
Conclusions
It’s hard to present a balanced view when you think there was nothing wrong with an event. Nothing is perfect though, we are all flawed in some way and the stuff we do is likely compromised somewhere. That said I think that the Blademaster’s Open 2022 came as close as it is feasible to get. The facilities were above adequate, the classes were well scheduled, delivered and attended. The competitive events were smoothly organised, judging seemed to flow well in all the pools I saw, decisive officials applied the rules clearly and with little dissent. Not too much time was spent ‘judging-by-comittee’ which is a pet hate of mine. The other attendees were not only great fencers but great company, the social was enjoyable even if the holiday camp setting was a bit weird for me.
On the drive home me and the Peasants had a chance to dissect and whilst almost totally positive we did come up with a couple of things that we might add/change to make it better:
- The rings are rectangular to accommodate the field of view of a camera. This means that movement around the ring is restricted if you want to avoid increased chance to be rung-out. It encourages quite linear fencing in my opinion and could easily be rectified by squaring them off (as they used to be).
- There wasn’t enough room between the outside of the ring and the tables. The judging table and the ‘media’ table (where the camera stood) were both about 40cm maximum from the tape. If there had been some bad luck fencers could easily stumbled in a grapple onto the scorekeepers which would not have been cool. Worse than this though was the way the tables prevented safe free movement of the line judges up and down the side lines. Even the main judge spent most of the time stood in one place. Visibility was reduced and maybe this caused more mistakes to be made. Not a big deal just move the ring out from the wall another meter and the media table out again from the ring. The hall was easily big enough to accommodate this.
- I think that some sort of shared dining does wonders for the bond amongst event goers. We all stayed in our own little houses, this was cool as we could wash and feed ourselves whenever/however we wanted but we didn’t come together for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The pub social did the job but it’s a very different thing to share sober social space with the whole group and I like doing that. This is such a minor thing, I know Andrzej had his hands full organising all that he did and the location didn’t lend itself at all well to a big group meal. It would have just been nice to have.
- Whilst I like the second round of advanced pools, on HEMA Scorecard, it looks like the points from the first round rolled over. That means if I won my pool with 42 points, ’cause it was tough for me, I would have very little chance of catching someone who racked up 80 odd points in theirs. I feel it would be better to zero the scores if it’s a new pool. The best fencers will still rise to the top but the level ground seems fairer.
There you have it, my review of the Blademasters’ Open 2022. A large high quality event with a great international atmosphere. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. You can comment below or reach me on the Wrathful Peasants page if you want to discuss anything in this or any of my other articles.
I am honestly trying to get more posts done, the problem is partly my own state of mind and motivation and partly because I can’t just write about what nonesense fencing I did down the village hall last week. If you want to see my opinions on anything in parrticular drop me a line, I always worked well with prompts!
The Wrathful Peasant 