Veteran Home Internationals

[Jethro]

PG wrote:-
To avoid forcing people to run through injury or feel they have let the team down by mispunching, perhaps the best 20 out of the 24 scores should be used.

That is as good a suggestion as I have heard proposed for overcoming the problem of injured runners. However I think it would also be better if we returned to the position of having the Individual race on the Saturday and relays on the Sunday (as it was in Ireland in 2008). As only 4 out of 6 relay teams count there is scope to shuffle teams after an injury picked up the previous day.

[EddieH]

An excellent suggestion from PG, although I'd prefer to see 35/40, 45/50 and 55/60 combined on the smae course with the top 3 to count.

I still think the relay system is heavily biased towards England as the system was changed some years ago to ensure the teams are very balanced across sex and age. With any nation that lacks depth in any class, particularly the older ones this forces these runners to be placed in a team with stronger members. I believe that the only conceivable way Scotland could be successful with this system was if England had a couple of DNFs as happened in Ireland 2 years ago with one DQ and one broken arm.

The fact that potentially Scotland came so close this year suggests that we no longer have many weaknesses in these classes and maybe we can compete in future, but neither of the smaller pool of Welsh or Irish orienteers can hope to compete with this system. I still fail to see why there is so much pressure to force such balanced teams as it ootentially kills excitement as it did this year when the individual was never going to pull it back.

[graeme]

The relay works OK for Scotland. If the messed-about team had won (as performances at the individual suggest they would), and ANY of the other three teams had been 90sec faster, Scotland would have won.

If you actually wanted a close competition, you have to do something about the relative sizes of the nations. e.g. if the Welsh only counted half as many runners (and doubled their points) then it would get interesting.

[EddieH]

Well if you do something on relative sizes then Scotland would need a similar though not as big advantage over England and then the competition would become very predictable

I think as I tried to allude before that the eveidence is that Scotland at last has a sufficiently depth of quality to be able to compete with this team selection system, something that IMO was manifestly untrue only a few years ago. The probem was that in some classes the runners that we are forced to include were maybe 20 minutes slower than England's - simply not recoverable from.

With the profile of orienteering changing this is likely to become a problem at the 35 end - as it is Scotland (withits smaller population) has a lot more runners running up than England which can only be to England's advantage.

[andypat]

To avoid forcing people to run through injury or feel they have let the team down by mispunching, perhaps the best 20 out of the 24 scores should be used.

On the other hand this would probably play more to the apparent strength in depth of England which would maybe make a future upset less likely?