Derby Day 2008
Posted in Photography, Sports, University |University of Essex vs. University of East Anglia.
40 Matches. 800 Participants. Two Universities. One Winner.
Derby Day is a huge sports event held once a year between the University of Essex and University of East Anglia. The event is held at both the universities alternating every year. This year, it was held here at Essex and all the participants from East Anglia came down here.
I was assigned to photograph all the hockey matches but ended up taking photographs of a majority of the events. The first hockey match was the mens and kicked off at 11AM. Essex won with a spectacular score of 8 - 3. This was followed by the womens hockey at 1PM which Essex lost but up a great fight and managed to get a decent score of 4 -2 even though East Anglia’s Women Hockey team was three leagues above ours. The final hockey match of the day was the mixed match and was quite entertaining. It was a very light hearted match and you could see that most of the players were having fun. We won this match too with an excellent score of 9 - 6.
In between all these matches and during the half times, I went over to several other matches to take a look at the scores and also to snap some photographs. One of the first ones I saw was American Football/Rugby which was quite exciting with a lot of action in the match and a huge crowd cheering them on. They won with a decent lead and while they were celebrating their victory, I headed down to the football fields and got a quick photo of the Womens Football team. I was running out of space in my camera so I came back to my room to upload the photos on to the computer and also made myself a simple lunch.
After that, I went down to the Sports Centre and got photographs of the womens volleyball which we unfortunately lost by a rather small margin. Once the volleyball got over, I went back to the football field where there were 2 mens football matches going on simultaneously on adjacent pitches. Both the matches were quite good and had a large supporting crowd who kept the matches alive. The teams managed to win one match and draw the other one.
We had a quick stop at Womens Netball and after a couple of photos, took a break and went down to the bar. We got ourselves a free meal each since we were volunteering to help out with Derby Day. After the meal, I headed downstairs into Sub Zero to watch boxing. The audience for boxing was beyond what I’d imagined and the sound of the cheering could be heard all the way to the top. The fights were a bit bloody but still very enthralling as could be seen by the roaring sound of the audience every time a powerful punch was thrown.
I came back to the flat for a hurried meal and went back to the Sports Centre for cheer leading which was pretty good, I must say. It was one of the final event of the day with only mens basketball remaining. As of now, I think Essex should have won Derby Day but we cant be sure until the final results come out. However, I do expect Essex to win since we won a majority of the sports including Athletics, Horse riding, Pool, Cricket, Basketball, etc and the scores when I last saw them were about 17 - 11 to Essex.
Photographs are being processed right now, I shall upload them as soon as I can.
Update - I have received confirmation that Essex has indeed won the Derby Title with a final score of 21 - 18.
Update 2 - I have uploaded the best photographs from the events, you can view all of them here.
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