Manly Beach – 17 – 19th November
After playing a fairly solid day on friday to qualify, Andy and I failed to produce our best volley on Saturday, losing to the French team in the morning, and then going down to Al Hinchley and Johnnie Byron in three sets to end our tournament with a 13th place.
Looking back at the result, it is fairly clear to me, (Andy might dissagree) that we failed to produce a good enough second ball on the side out. Too often we had to stretch, or adjust on the spike approach, which created a high number of errors in hitting. This problem amplified with pressure in the final set against Hinchley/Byron, and produced some spectacularly poor VolleyBall. (Some might even call it a “choke”). We lost the set 15 – 6.
So where do we go from here?
The first thing to do is to round up the positives.
- A solid game against the Vic guys, in our second match of the qualifier, where we played a good consistent game.
- A great game against Pat and Lachlan in the last game on Saturday to break through the qualifiers. This game was a thrashing, and really showed that we do have the mettle to over power a lot of teams on the tour. (Especially if they haven’t played for the last 5 years, and spend all day in the losers bracket playing themselves to a stand still.)
In both these games we showed a good consistent game.
The negatives.
- We showed an inability to side out on crucial points. We made simple errors, which can only be put down to nerves, or lack of focus. We made these errors at times in each game where we needed to make a decisive play.
- There were a few examples of errors on opportunity poiints, where a transition play was wasted with simple skill errors.
The first point in the negatives pretty much tells the story.
We failed to perform our skills to the required level at the crucial moments.