Safety to Forced Scratch-8

This is a diagram (approximate, as always) from the final game of my match this past Monday night at Identity Bar. At this point we were down 0-1 after losing the first match. I was playing a SL3, who only had to win two games to take the match; I am now playing as a SL4 and therefore needed three games to win it. In this final game of my match I just wasn't getting very good placement and so I was resorting to safeties until I could get a good pattern. I still had four solids on the table and my opponent was going for the 8. It was my turn and I was considering my options when Peter came over and suggested we talk about a safety off my 6 ball. As you can see from the diagram, it was a pretty effective move to go two rails off the 6 and hide behind the 2 ball. The cool thing about the safety was that if I had hit it too softly there was going to be a strong chance my opponent would scratch in the side pocket (or, top center pocket looking at this diagram) if he had gone for the top left corner. He took a coach and they decided to kick into the 8 ball to go into the top right pocket (I think he had a little more room past the 6 ball into that corner than this diagram shows). But clearly they didn't think about "hitting wide" on the 8 because that was also clearly going to scratch. Admittedly, there's a lot of hindsight going on here. Another thing I should mention about this scenario is that my opponent's coach had his finger held to the rail to indicate where he should hit it. As in, finger on the rail even as the cue ball was hit and was well on its way toward the rail. David Ferrara, who was keeping score, immediately called him out on it but as the cue went off the 8 ball into the side pocket, it quickly became a moot point. Yet while it's never any fun to win when an opponent scratches on the 8 ball, I was definitely lucky to escape with the win to tie things up 1-1. Adam won the next match (also on an S8) to put us ahead 2-1. We lost the fourth match but then Josh came through in the end to win it for us in the rubber. A welcome change of pace from losing the past two weeks in a row. As it stands, we are 7-4 for the season.