The actions are usually quite far away and a 300mm lens on a 1.5x crop factor camera with a 35mm equivalent field of view of 450mm is needed.
With a short lens (less than 300mm equivalent field of view on 35mm format), you can only capture the near actions and you are left with shooting those actions at the sideline or touchline near to you. In such cases, positioning is very crucial. If one team is much stronger than the other (which often happens in ealier rounds) and you position yourself at the touchline of the stronger team, you're likely to get nothing as the weaker team cannot get pass to the last third of the stronger team. Even if you're on the touchline of the right team, the attack may be on the other side of the poles (i.e. right side when you're on the left side of touchline or left side when you're on the right side of touchline). :sweatsm:
A 70-300mm is barely sufficient on a 1.5x crop factor camera.
A bigma 50-500mm is ideal for actions at various distances.
BTW, I will be shooting with a prosumer camera. :lovegrin:
As usual, I'm there more for the sports actions than photography. ..... and believe me, there will be many pretty young things around (assuming this year is the same as the past).
