So it's the early hours and it's been a long day. But then again it's been a long few months to boot and all the Wild Turkey in the world won't take the edge off. But I'll give it a bash anyway.

Anyone who knows anything about the team knows that it has been up and down. We spent some solid bootcamps getting all geared up for CGS then drew Berlin Allianz in the first round, which in our mind was the worst thing that could have happened. Sure, you want to play the best, but you also want to get warmed up and settled first of all. The draws seemed random, the seeding system - if any existed - was buck wild. Two mixes up against each other, the 4th spot from the UK the previous year up against the European winners... It was pretty slipshod but one believes thought was not really put into the event. I doubt any results would have changed the outcome of who was drafted.

After deservedly losing to Berlin we sort of spent the event looking at each other and trying to figure out what the next step was. I mean, we'd bootcamped all that time to fall out in the single elimination event. All the work we'd put in meant nothing. The praise we'd received  from the previous events meant nothing (we'd of course beat fnatic and had Birmingham Salvo pay us the ultimate compliment in saying we were the best UK side they'd played at i-series) and we were just in some weird limbo.

We vowed to not be like other typically UK sides and switch the team around, making big decisions based on little events, and took the same team to SGL SummerSlam, AKA "The LAN that never was". We were one of the favourites for that event and I believe fully that had it been played out in full we'd have won that LAN and be sat in an alternate future right now. Maybe that is delusional bullshit, but I don't usually get like that and with a head full of whisky such demented flights of fantasy don't come easy. No, I think it's fair to say we'd have won it...

Instead we got told it was back to the glorious land of online and if morale weren't low enough after we all twigged that we'd be taking a loss to attend the Summer Slam, even if we'd won it, then came the inevitable roster problem. Instead of petty bickering or the blame game this time around it was simply real life intruding on one of our players, namely Adam "shivers" Marsden. Anyone who follows the UK scene knows how talented he is and he was a huge loss, not just for the team dynamic, but for everyone on a personal level. I'd worked with him back in the xciteuk days - hell, he was xciteuk before even I was. But the show has to go on and that's what we tried to do.

Of course it wasn't easy to replace him and we were linked with a good ferw players. Some of the names kicked about were probably true for all of three PCWs, but ultimately in these time of free LAN hungry mercenaries it can be hard to find someone who is going to work hard for the team, even if you know them and have a good relationship with them.In the end we went for someone that probably came as a surprise, but we all felt good about it and we named Will "RedH" Manson as our fifth. He'd played with a lot of our lads in 1.6 and they knew that he would fit in and, perhaps more importantly in the long run, stick around.

I don't really want to talk about Sychosis much. I think we all know that was a poor performance and there's only so many excuses you can make before you sound like everyone else out there. We got outplayed by teams that were better on the day and those results, for the first time, made us think long about our future as a team. While we mulled it over we just dropped off the radar and made the decision to not take part in the other competitions we had planned to send a squad in for. We sort of just enjoyed the start of the summer, take in a few festivals, a few drinks... Jack "Callisto" Mason managed to sell everything he owned on ebay and spam the phrase "WHO WAS PHONE?" approximately one thousand times on various forums. Good times.

So now we hit the comeback trail and look to achieve at the next i-series, only weeks away. I hope we can live up to our potential and it's mostly up to me to try and get us there. It;s a comeback trail for me too - I've been in some sort of semi-retirement for a good while, dropping out the scene as much as possible for family and sanity reasons. I'm still 100% behind this team and I'm still looking to add to those podium finishes with Zboard. I'll be with Infused now until that inevitable "retirement" kicks my door all the way in, instead of just scratching at the wood like it has been. The game gets tougher every day, people hardcoring it and bridging the skill gap, but anything can happen at an i-series. Let's hope it's our time this time around.