by Bob Fromer
Haarlem, Netherlands -- The forecast for Friday in Haarlem said 100% chance of rain and heavy rain all day. And the forecast was exactly right. By the end of a particularly ferocious downpour late in the afternoon, the fields at the Nol Houtkamp Sports Complex, where the 14th ISF Women's World Championships are being played, were completely under water, and any thought of starting the playoff rounds on Friday was abandoned.
Now, with three days of play to fit into two -- and with the forecast not much more promising for Saturday and Sunday -- the organisers have taken the sad but sensible step of cancelling the Consolation Playoff Round for the eight teams that failed to make the Championship playoffs.
For the GB Women's Team, this means that the tournament is now over and all that remains -- weather permitting -- is to watch the eight top teams battle it out for the medal places.
There has never been a Consolation Round before at the Women's World Championships, but the idea was successfully trialled at the Junior World Championships in Canada last summer, and the GB Under-19 Team took advantage of it to secure a ninth-place finish. But it will now have to wait for the 2016 Women's World Championships in Vancouver before a senior Consolation Round is played.
The GB Women will therefore end the tournament as the 15th or 16th-placed team. Both Puerto Rico in Pool A and GB in Pool B failed to win a game during the round-robin phase of the tournament, and the ISF will decide in due course how to rank them against each other.
The fact that GB has no more games to play is not only a shame for the players, who wanted more chances to get a win, but also for the five young players from BSUK's High Performance Academy (HPA) who arrived in the Netherlands yesterday to watch and learn from the games being played here. The HPA players were only able to see the GB Women's Team play once, when they lost 7-0 Chinese Taipei on Thursday. But there will be much to learn from watching the top teams play over the next two days.
