We start off in blue. Nice grab and start-off dodge.
A little movement and cue best action sequence in Northern Bites/RoboCup history. Let’s watch that again! We grab. Their goalie attempts a kick. This kick is ridiculous, and takes approximately two seconds to execute. We grab and turn towards goal. Their goalie gets unbalanced, and flips over. We bump the ball and continue running after it. The goalie then calls its own ‘standup’ procedure while we ram it in the side. It flips over again. One of their human teammates yells ‘PUSHING! PUSHING!!!’, though its goalie is not technically in the box. I hear Chown in the video yell ‘What?!’. It doesn’t matter. Another Blue swoops in, misses a grab, illegal defender, grabs, turns, scoots to open space, goal. 1-0. Man, do I hate the crappy black advertisements behind the goals. What the Eff! The guy who placed them out asked me if it was O.K. to do so; I should have said no. The new goals where supposed to make things viewable.
This ref really calls out the 3 seconds of our grab. ‘ONE THOUSAND, TWO THOUSAND….’. We get a corner with a wide open goal that we don’t convert — our localization messes up and we don’t spin towards the open net, but dodge towards the endline. Wtf, mate?
Our dogs get a little clogged, but before 1 second is up, a FCTwaver again yells ‘PUSHING! PUSHING!!!’. My lord, is that annoying. Yell at the ref for calling things, but don’t influence the man. It’s robot soccer after all.
They get behind our defense with a good grab and shot into space that rolls directly in front of the goal. Our goalie decides to be passive and just localize away from good positioning. Bastard. They grab nicely again and shoot it in for 1-1. Nick Dunn edits the video to announce their goal before the ball rolls over the goalline. I hate you, Nick Dunn. Don’t take the suspense away from the audience.
Really nice kickoff routine where we fake one way but, sensing an opponent, dodge to free space, hitting the ball all the way to the goal post. An illegal defender manages to hit the ball (refs, you shouldn’t let this happen), but the ball gets replaced (refs, nice job on this). We just nudge it in without deciding to grab it, knocking it in off the goalie’s leg. 2-1. High Five!
Ugly next kickoff. Lost the ball, missed some grabs, etc. But we have a nice clear near our goalbox. They return the ball, and we knock it out of bounds. We take a shot from midfield that goes, goes, curves, curves, all the way to the goal line. Their goalie is out of position. We grab it into the goal. 3-1.
Some ugly stuff after the next kickoff. We get a sideline OB. Our positioning defender knocks the ball backwards not seeing it, and it gets near our goalbox. Our goalie pushes it out. We clump up a bit, and at first sight of contact, I hear ‘PUSHING! PUSHING!!!’. Goddamnit anyway! The rules of pushing are clear: three seconds of it and you then you call it. You see, the robots do not have the wonderful sense of touch. They can’t tell when they are near another robot let alone banging into them (or the goals, or beacons). We’ve done as a team an amazing job keeping our robots from interfering with one another, but we can’t avoid the occasional tappage. Yelling at the ref to call it at 200 ms is not necessary. Bad form — and trust me, I know what bad form is.
We eventually clear. Looks like our dogs’ communication has broken down. They stop role-switching. We score 4-1 off of sheer determination. Off kickoff one of our defenders gets a save! That doesn’t happen much. Some more ‘PUSHING! PUSHING!!!’. Looks like we now have a defender. We shoot from half-field, lands again on the goalline. We charge after it. Within 300 milliseconds of touching their goalie, ‘PUSHING! PUSHING!!!’ to which I hear in the video us wittingly scream: ‘THREE SECONDS! THREE SECONDS!!!’. Man, are we the bomb. Or as they say in France, ‘Nous sommes le bombe’.
Halftime — Sweet! 5-1. I love changing uniforms.
We go red. The power color. Missed grab. Some innovative dodging, gets it near their goalie box. We do a sweeping dodge and plow it in the goal. 6-1. That was about as quick as they come.
They have some manual playing state issues. We make some not-exciting but solid moves. We score again. Nick Dunn does that thing where the ‘7-1’ pops up before we actually score. You’re on my list, Nick Dunn.
Some breakdowns in communication start the next kickoff. We move the ball down there but have issues putting it in the goal. Hit the post, grab and bring it back around, but do some weird goal moves and end up centering instead of shooting a wide open goal. For the next few minutes, on the video you can hear me and jesse debating some shooting logic.
We have an open net, but our offender is in the way. I yell ‘get out of the way, get out of the way!’ He does (of course) and we go up 8-1. Nick Dunn, yet again, fails at proper video editing. He is so close to being cut.
9-1 comes after a player pushing penalty by us. Smacks of more communication problems. We have a really nice dodge of the goalie where our shot hits the post. We grab and pull it around which the dog decides to chest-bump it in. Don’t know why, but it works.
Some great tries in the following sequences. Some classic we move it up the field play, followed by a shot that goes OB, followed by a grab on the place-in, repeat. Game ends. Hurrah.
Watch Video: Google Video, High Quality [193 mb].