We have officially won our third place match against the CIT Brain team. It was an incredibly close game. It even caused multiple issues with the simulation, forcing restarts of the simulation. Due to this the game had to be delayed by 5 hours. We had to wait even longer and we struggled with containing our excitement and anxiousness about the game.

When the game started it was explained that there were a few technical issues that would be explained throughout the stream and we still had no idea what had happened.

In the first half we played a bit too aggressively according to the referee and one of our robots got a yellow card, another one got a warning. We got scared of losing one of our strikers… Our aggressive play did help us to score a first goal though.
The simulator crashing after the first half saved us though. For the second half all cards were reset, but to make up for it, the CIT Brains got the kick off again.

We hoped that one of the major advantages of the simulation would be, that we would not have to struggle with hardware issues. However, we managed to actually do have hardware issues… and of course they were in this important game!
Our feet got stuck in each other and we didn’t manage to get them apart again. Luckily our robot was reset to outside of the field soon after and our hardware issues were solved again.

Watching the game, it felt like a real soccer game considering how much we screamed at the referee. Throughout a few questionable decisions happened, including putting the ball only centimeters in front of our goal. Our goalie positioned on its goal line, but was removed, because the goalie was now considered too close to the goal. Since our goal was without a goalie now, it was easy for CIT Brains to score.

They scored again later with another questionable referee decision.

Their luck did not hold though, because very close before the end of the match, the referee awarded a penalty kick to us and removed the goalie in a similar fashion to our earlier issues. We finally managed to equalize to a score of 2-2.

As there was no time left for the organizers to simulate and show a game including overtime, they decided to skip overtime. We instead immediately went to the penalty shoot out.

We got scared there, because from our tests we knew our penalty kicks can sometimes go inside the goal, but most of the time we would not hit the goal. However, the CIT Brains commentator told the viewers they had not tested their penalty behavior. So we got our hopes up again. During the first penalty kick, their robot took the ball and tried to dribble it into our goal. They were then removed from the playing area.

We managed to kick the ball after the referee allowed us to kick it, but the ball stopped moving right in front of the goal line.

For the following kicks the CIT Brain robot just stopped moving and we only got the ball very close to the goal line multiple times.

Our saving grace was our fourth shot.We finally managed to get past the goal line with the ball and scored a goal.

As the CIT Brains did not shoot in their fifth shoot, we managed to win the game with a final score of 3-2.