By Bob Fromer
Plant City, Florida: 25 January – The GB Slowpitch Team rattled out 21 hits, including inside-the-park home runs by Kirstie Leach and David Lee, and also took advantage of eight errors by the Turks & Caicos Islands as GB won their final round-robin game at the ISF Slowpitch World Cup this morning by a score of 23-4.
The result did not affect the final round-robin standings. Following their 9-8 extra-inning loss to the USA Ink Daddyz on Friday evening, GB knew they would finish in third place, and when the playoffs begin at 3.00 this afternoon, GB will face the undefeated round-robin winner USA Fort Walton Beach.
Second place Ink Daddyz will play fourth-place Canada, fifth-place France will play the seventh place Turks & Caicos Islands and sixth-place Curacao will play eighth-place Bulgaria in a modified double Page Playoff format.
If GB can beat Fort Walton Beach, they will be potentially just two games away from the final that will begin at noon on Sunday. Lose to Fort Walton Beach, and GB will need to win their next three games to get to the final.
Quick opening
GB started quickly against Turks & Caicos, with seven runs in the first inning, all unearned, on six hits and four errors by the opposition.
Ben Watson, David Lee, Gelske Huyer, Areej Elmaazi and Kath Golik all had singles and Ian Kulka had a double, but with better play in the infield, the Turks & Caicos Islanders might have held GB scoreless.
After that, the runs flowed less freely for GB until the fifth and final inning, when they scored ten runs on seven hits, plus three errors and three walks, to put the icing on the cake.
Kirstie Leach scored GB's lone run in the second inning on an inside-the-park home run driven to the distant outfield fence in right field, and David Lee was responsible for the two GB runs in the fourth inning with his own home run, a powerful drive that bisected the outfielders in right centre.
Adam Haywood led the GB batting with a single, a double and a triple, while Kath Golik also had three hits that produced four RBIs and Ben Watson chipped in with three singles.
Turks & Caicos put a bunch of runners on base over the first three innings, including a lead-off triple in the first inning by Emilyanne Stubbs, and managed to score four runs in that span. But they went up and down in order in the fourth and fifth innings and weren't trying very hard by the end.
Starting this afternoon, the tournament will get more serious, and GB will need to try to find a way past the two American teams if they want to come home with the Gold Medal. Both games against the American teams were close, and the difference in both may just have been that little extra bit of experience on the part of the Americans.
We will see how much GB has learned from those games over the next 24 hours.
Previous games
Reports on GB's previous games in the ISF Slowpitch World Cup can be found on these links:
http://www.britishsoftball.org/news/view/gb-slowpitch-opens-world-cup-with-win-over-canada
http://www.britishsoftball.org/news/view/gb-slowpitch-looks-towards-playoff-run
http://www.britishsoftball.org/news/view/gb-slowpitch-grabs-another-easy-win
http://www.britishsoftball.org/news/view/gb-slowpitch-loses-extra-inning-thriller
Final round-robin standings
1 – USA Fort Walton Beach (7-0)
2 – USA Ink Daddys (5-2)
3 – Great Britain (5-2)
4 – Canada (4-3)
5 – France (2-5)
6 – Curacao (2-5)
7 – Turks & Caicos (1-6)
8 – Bulgaria (1-6)