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| GB Women draw Olympic winner Japan in World Championship pool play |
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Sixteen teams from around the world will contest the ISF Women's Fastpitch World Championships this summer in Caracas, Venezuela, and play will begin with two round-robin groups of eight teams each.
The ISF has now announced seedings for the tournament, which determine the make-up of those first-round groups, and the GB Women's Fastpitch Team has been seeded ninth overall.
This puts Great Britain in a group headed by the 2008 Olympic champions Japan, and also with the Netherlands, who edged out GB last summer in the final of the European Championships in Valencia.
GB's goal will be to finish in the top four in Pool A and make it through to the playoffs, which would ensure a top 8 finish in the tournament.
But the road to fourth place in Pool A may well involve another showdown with the Dutch.
Pool Groups
The two pool groups, with seedings shown in brackets, are as follows:
Pool A
Japan (1)
Canada (4)
Chinese Taipei (5)
Netherlands (8)
Great Britain (9)
South Africa (12)
Argentina (13)
Cuba (16)
Pool B
USA (2)
Australia (3)
China (6)
Venezuela (7)
New Zealand (10)
Botswana (11)
Dominican Republic (14)
Czech Republic (15)
Dangers in Wait
Because of the way the ISF makes up the pools, the seedings above, especially in the bottom half of the draw, do not necessarily reflect the ability of the teams.
The top eight seeds in the tournament are based on placings at the last Olympic competition in Beijing, so those will be fairly accurate. But after that, the ISF seeds teams that competed in the last World Championships but not in the Olympics (GB is one of those), and then seeds teams that didn't compete in either at the bottom of the draw.
As a result, no one in Pool B is going to relish playing the Dominican Republic, despite their lowly seeding. And in GB's group, both Argentina and Cuba are unknown quantities, but both may well be better than South Africa.
Making the Playoffs
For GB to finish fourth in Pool A, the team will need to win at least four games. That almost certainly means beating the three teams seeded below us, and then one of the teams seeded above us.
One of those wins is unlikely to come against Japan, but GB will still be looking forward to meeting the team that dethroned the USA to win softball's last Olympics in Beijing.
And there are players on the GB Team that will remember our only other meeting with Japan, in the Softball World Cup in Oklahoma City in 2006. On that occasion, behind guest pitcher Tiffany McDonald, GB led Japan 6-2 after five innings, only for Tiffany to run out of gas in 40-degree heat, allowing Japan to come back and win by a score of 7-6.
However, fourth place in Pool A could well come down to a dogfight between GB and the Dutch, and unlike in Valencia, GB will be planning to come out on top this time.
Selection and Plans
Final selections for the GB Women's Team that will go to Venezuela will be announced on Saturday, March 6 at the GB Awards Evening at Twickenham Rugby Stadium.
GB-based and overseas-based team members will get together in Orlando, Florida for a week-long training camp starting on June 13, and the team will fly to Caracas on June 19.
The team hopes to play scrimmage games against three teams in Pool B -- Venezuela, Botswana and New Zealand -- before the World Championships begin on Wednesday, June 23.
The Gold Medal Game is scheduled for Friday, July 2.
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