There Ain't No Such Thing as a Nailed On Cert....

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was at a competition this weekend and fencing once again demonstrated to me that there's no such thing as certainty involved. When I arrived I took a look around at the other competitors and was not hopeful when I saw the opposition. Whilst having been a fencer for over 20 years now I have only really been doing epee seriously for the last year or so and in that regard was not expecting to do that well. However, a number of things happened to show that fencing chickens should not be counted before they hatch...
I won my first fight, with a satisfying final point of bind disengage fleche. Put me in a good mood, but I knew my next fight was against someone I didn't expect to beat...
I won that fight as well, 5-3. Crivens! I was then reasonably confident that I would beat the next opponent as I had watched him and planned some tactics to use
I lost (badly) 5-1. Curses! Also, I didn't expect to win my next fight either
I didn't (so sometimes I'm right) but I did get a nice broken time hit in to the wrist. I thought I might win the next one but knew it would be close.
I won that one. Could I win the last one and make it 4 wins 2 defeats? I was feeling confident as I had a plan for my next opponent, a left hander.
The plan worked to an extent but I still lost. I had planned to feint to leg and deceive his octave parry and hit to arm. This worked but my other techniques didn't.
So I finished 3 up 3 down, which in retrospect was pretty good and probably went against my expectations.
I then went into the Direct Elimination stage and the story of the first fight is in the previous post. So then I ended up in the last eight and found myself fencing the left handed fellow from my pool. My strategy was to stay with him for as long as possible and then change rhythm to try and win it. At the first period I was 5-4 down so the plan still looked on, however I had a poor start to the next period and quickly found myself 8-4 down. From then on I was trying to chase the match and finally ended up losing 15-7 as my fleche attacks simply weren't good enough and I began to snatch at my disengages, meaning I was missing a lot. Most significantly, my opponent had better point control than me and fenced well, picking me off on the arm a lot.
Ultimately I finished in the top half, which was better than I expected. Plus, I did better than one of my main training partners, which was even more of a surprise. But one of the significant things I continue to realise is that you can never predict how things are going to go.... and that I still have loads to learn.