Poland is going to be an interesting tournament for Australia.
Apart from the two teams in the women’s qualifiers, who both have very good chances of coming through, we have a debut appearance of a new team, Luke Campbell and Dan Carey.
But lets start with the girls.
Palmer-Bawden, coming off a great tournament in Klagenfurt (17th), have what should be a relatively easy first round match against Stastna-Grygarova CZE, before meeting the winner of Brown-Herbert GBR [19] Vs Bratuhhina-Puri EST [14].
Rohkamper-Jensen meet Ozaki-Kusano JPN first up. This is a fairly new Japanese team, and have not produced any good results yet. If Alice and Heike can get through that they are likely to face the British team of Johns-Boulton. Palmer-Bawden defeated this team last week quite comfortably, so it’s certainly a winnable draw.
The men’s draw is not up yet, but Boehm-McHugh will go in at about 22nd seed, and Campbell-Carey will go in at about seed 50, which will give them a fairly tough first round match. We’ll be watching with interest.
This new Aussie team is going to be interesting for a number of reasons. Obviously first up, we have one of our best indoor middle blockers on the sand, and secondly we have a genuine beach volleyballer player behind him in Dan Carey. I think it’s great that this guy has a chance to get out there. He’s proven himself to have what it takes to beat guys that are much bigger then he is, and playing behind a block like Campbells is exactly what he needs to take it to the next level.