It's really disappointing that we had to remove the pre-quarter from the format this year. In a nutshell the venue reduced the time that was available for the tournament on Saturday (relatively late on)...

One impact of that was that it wasn't really possible to implement the preQ on Sat. The EUF Committee had a long discussion about putting the game in at the end of Friday - i.e. those teams would play 4 games on Friday.  We weren't unanimous in this, but in the end it was agreed that this was too physically demanding - i.e. it was not a safe thing to require of the players involved. We thought this was the correct compromise to make.

EUF committee Tweet