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Tahitian Volleyball Championship

The Saga Continues

Monday 19 May 2008 by legendary_totoro

This match has been pushed back so many times that I don’t remember when it was originally scheduled... At last, we get to play it and here’s how it went...

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Third Set

I get a bit scolded by both the coach and Axel for not having that bit of lucidity and as the score has evened out, we need to gather back some combativity and bring it all out.

We start losing the brawl contest in the attack/block field as I’m insisting on providing our centers some balls to spike despite their failed attempts. Thierry has taken the upper hand in all situations he was involved in against our guys... So we’re forced to put an option on him whether he is in front or in the back (possible pipe combination).

Their strategy works and from there on we are already behind by 2-3 points and we have to chase again.

At some point, I got a hint from Maka into passing the ball to the spiker with the weakest blocker in front. This is actually some basic strategy but my dedication to my former post (center) made me lose sight of that.

I guess that triggered something in me as I was able to be more focused on who’s on the opposite side of the net in order to make the right choice. I think that radical change of game plan gave the headache to some blockers because I started putting my attackers on 1 on 1 situations. Thanks to that we’re able to recover right before money time.

Steve who has replaced Vaana at some point in the set was pretty left out and I manage to give him a try to shine and he converts his first try and grabs the set for us !

Score : 26-24, we take back the lead 2-1.

Fourth Set

It seems we were able to stop them from having any hopes of coming back in the last set and we keep the pressure on them and assume the early lead in this one.

I think we took a decisive psychological advantage when I was in the front line at some point :
- I was voluntarily announcing I was willing to block their wing-man alone
- During the receive I was voluntarily announcing the option was on their backliner spiker or on Thierry (which were their obvious best attackers)

This resulted in several attempts from their setter to give the ball to the wing-man who I blocked several times or set my center Terau in good shape to block him. =)
That part was really exciting to me as I was able to show I wasn’t an easy guy to deal with on the front.

I guess they were starting to run out of solutions when we saved several balls from their best attackers and managed to take a comfy lead of 5-6 points at the 2nd technical time out.

We keep our motivation high and keep the side out in our favor to finally end this match.

Score : 25-20, we won 3-1 !

NB : The scores may not be very accurate because I wasn’t really paying attention to them, but I think they reflect well how it went

Conclusion

It was probably one of my best matches as a setter despite having failed something like 2-3 passes per set. I guess I still have room for progress but I’m somewhat satisfied by the quality of my settings, my strategical prowess and my proven strength as a blocker.

We’ve probably grabbed at least 2nd place with this win as we’re still waiting for Tefana and Venus to play each other.

Here are the possibilities :
- Tefana wins and gets 1st place (only one loss)
- Venus wins and we’re all tied (gotta look at the set average)

You’re probably wondering why this has any kind of relevance here ? I’ve just heard the 4 best teams would be heading into some play-offs with some weird structure depending of the ranking at the end of the regular season : 1st place - 0 points 2nd place - 1 point 3rd place - 2 points 4th place - 3 points (or something approaching this)

We’ll face each other during prelims with 2 points awarded to the winner of a match and 1 point for the loser.
Then we’ll have the 2 last teams playing each other for rankings and the 2 others for the grand finale.

I don’t really know what to think of that system right now as the only practical thing I have in mind is that the season is getting extended by artificial means while I have other obligations to fill...

Update

Here are the real scores :


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