OK, to clear a few things up;

Merlin Vs Storm 2

This is one of the best fights we have had, and the result could of easily gone either way. Merlin is always going to seen slow compared to storm (as do most), also in the fight before we suffered a battery failure, so we were running this fight with a very unbalanced setup with 2 packs fairly flat even before the fight, this could of been a factor in its speed. Storm only got a couple of good slams on us, we got numerous flips on him. We nearly had him OOTA twice during the fight, when he was stacked normally we would leave them in a comp but we played it for the crowd and tried for the OOTA, also Storm had gone out in the fight before by being stacked (also lost the UK champs this way), so we thought we would give him a break . Storm got flipped by the arena flipper several times as well, this could also go against him. The part when we sat in the middle of the arena was due to the floor, we were unable to move away as the flipper tip jammed under floor panels. The smoke at the end was caused by a loose wire causing high resistance and causing the cable insulation to get hot and smoke, the cable was fine (and is still in the machine), the reason for the over reaction and fire extinguishers was i thought it might be the NiCads due them being unbalanced.

Merlin Vs Iron Awe

We had suffered alot of damage in the previous fight against THZ, and only had a small amount of time to fix it, the arm had been badly bent and would not retract fully after the fist flip, meaning we lost our ground clearance. As for turning sideways on, most drivers will make one mistake during a fight, it all depends on if the other machine takes advantage of it, unlucky for us Iron Awe managed to get a flip on us. It was during the winter tour semi against I.A. that our flipper failed (a tiny wire that supplies the power for the valves had broken).

Most close decisions are always controversial, as it all comes down to opinion on what somebody defines as aggression, style, control and damage.