World Cup - Day 18 - vs Panama

Woke up today and went to breakfast then went to go pick up my laundry only for it not to be there. I thought no worries, its still over an hour until we have to leave so I'll just go back down later to see if it's there. With about 35 minutes before we left the laundry wasn't there, then with about 25 minutes before we left, the laundry still wasn't there. I began to worry so about 15 minutes before we left I went to check downstairs to see if our uniforms were there, and sure enough they were there in bags. Instead of us taking our clothes from the bags we all just jumped on the bus in casual clothes and had to get ready at the field.

We left at 9:00am to head to Rod Carew Stadium in Panama City. The journey is suppose to take around 30 minutes, but this journey took over an hour which wasn't ideal for us seeing as the game started at 11:00am. Nonetheless we all did what we had to do to get ready for the game. Before the game we do introductions, and it was pretty funny doing introductions when there were about 10 people in a stadium that holds up to 25,000. We joked around as we ran out waving to the 'crowd'.

The crowd was electric today!

We defeated Panama 5-4 in another extra inning thriller. If only every game we played went into extra innings, I'm confident we would win all of them. In extra innings our team seems to find another gear and well in baseball terms, we get clutch and get the big hit and the important out. Stefan Welch was the offensive star for us today going 3 for 5 and driving in 4 of the 5 runs. Tom Brice also went 3 for 4 and drove in our other run. Chris Oxpsring delivered another quality start and left the game with a 3-2 lead but Brendan Wise was unable to shut the door giving up 1 run whilst getting 1 out. Steve Kent then came in and threw the last 1 2/3 innings picking up the victory. Even though we won it still wasn't enough to get us into the bronze medal game, instead we are playing for 5th spot which would equal Australia's best finish at a Baseball World Cup.

When we got back to the hotel I still didn't have a room, so I went back to Justin and Kable's room and sat there for a little while before I went for a walk to the mall just to see if there was anything worth buying. This time every shop in the mall was open, but there was nothing worth buying. Not a bad thing I guess, get to save a bit of money. 

After my adventure to the mall I finally had a room to move into, so packed up my bags again and moved 4 floors down into the new room. Feels nice to finally be able to lay down in a bed after a long day and tomorrow is only going to be longer as we may have to wake up at 6:30am to travel back to Santiago to play for 5th spot. We've already battled hard all tournament, we pretty much came back from the dead to make it to the second round, all we need is to dig deep one more time.