Having enjoyed my best golf play the last couple of years during the team competition here in Odense, I got my first experience with the now not so new match play finals. I've been very negative towards this system before. The first of two main reason is that removing half the lanes for the individual competition is not fair to the players that are good on the other half of the lanes. The second reasoning is that two or three bad shots could destroy months of preparations even if you have a commanding lead going in to the finals.
Both of these reasons came in to effect in my loss to Allan Schwab this morning. I was 38 shots better that Allan during the team competition but during our match we played equal in shots (and lanes won) on the felt and he won one lane on a badly played eternite. He played really good felt and while I made two 2s (boxes, won and twin gate, lost) and one 3 (hole in a slope, lost) and aced the rest, it wasn't enough since my three best lanes weren't selected for the finals.
I will stop this post now as I probably won't say anything good at all. One question though. The players ranked 1, 2, 4 and 5 didn't make it through the 2nd round and in all likelyhood all of these would have been in the super final in the old system. Is that the way to get a champion?
I have now played one match play final, I doubt there will be another.