2nd senior tour -Tunisia

Tunisia

This was the first time I had even been to Africa before, and I was quite excited to see exactley what it was like. Tunisia to me was suprising. Essentially it was a 'Middle Eastern' country in Africa that was a little more lenient in its Islamic rules. (Dress code etc) Also the fact it was very French influenced came as a big suprise to me. Most people spoke a good amount of French and all the signs were also in French as well. On a trip to the store Chika and I even found that some of the workers in the store spoke Italian as well! Pherhaps the greatest bit about the European influence was the French pastries that were avaliable for lunch and dinner each day, without them many of us would of struggling surviving the endless supply of the same types of food. (Although it was still much better than some places we have been before) We were also able to visit some ancient Roman ruins in Carthage, which although were a little interesting we were all looking forward to a swim in the beach, which many of us had not done for a while due to our love of following the winter playing volleyball in Europe!!! The beach did not less us down, the water was a great temperature and of course there was much flipping off other peoples shoulders. (Igor is however never allowed to be the 'flipee' again after he went straight up vertically instead of slightly sideways and almost landed on my head) However nice the beach was Tunisia itself was rather dirty with the mandatory cats running around everywhere (including on the baggage claim at the airport) However no matter what the country was like we all knew we had a job to do on the court. The Matches The first set started off fairly shockingly for ourselves. Our passers found it hard to adjust to the clear window on one side of the gym, which made it impossible to read the spin of the ball from a serve because the ball was in shadow up until the last possible second. Things went from bad to worse and we lost the set to about 15 (cant quite remember) We changed the passing lineup and suddenly we were much more settled. With our quicks running efficently due to the better passing our outsides had a much easier job. We ended up taking the set comfortably. Much of the same continued for the next 2 sets and we were able to gain an early lead and after a few stumbles take both sets, and therefore the match 3-1. It was a great feeling beating an olympic team in Tunisia (Possibly the first time we have beaten Tunisia in Tunis) especially since we had a young and upcoming team, coupled with the fact we were missing a normal starter in Paul who was taking a match off to rest his troublesome knee. A change of scenery to 'the dome' was in order for the next 4 matches. The dome was a massive, suprisingly dome shaped stadium with massive seating capacity, in which we possibly had a total of 10 people attend all 4 matches put together! It seemed this type of atmosphere did not seem to suit us as we put up a fairly dismal performance to lose 3-0 in the second match. It was very dissapointing to go from a good win to a bad loss in such a short period of time. This is something I clearly put down to a mixture of lack of concentration and just overall consistency as a unit. Something that will not be good enough at a World Championships later in the year.However all we could do now was learn from our mistake and play a better match the next day. Match 3 started very well for us Aussies. Winning the first set with some good play and then gaining a handy lead in the second. However we seemed to relax a little and our inability to side out in the last 3rd of that second set gave Tunisia a set victory that we felt should of been ours. So with the match in the balance at 1-1 it was Tunisia who stood up and played more consistent volleyball to take the next 2 sets in close circumstances. It was dissapoint for any team to be in such a good position only to let it slip. This was even more annoying to us for in our goal setting meeting at the start of the tour we highlighted the fact that we really wanted to finish teams off when in this exact situation. Match 4 unfortunatelly had a similar storyline to match 3. Winning the first set we were not go on with the job and subsequently lost 3-1. It was especially frustrating to all these involved in the Australian team because it was clear that when we played our best volleyball there was nothing Tunisia could do to stop us. However simple skill errors, bad shot decisions and serving errors at the wrong time were giving Tunisia the momentum they needed to get back into the sets. At this stage we were 1-3 against Tunisia with 1 match left, so even though the series was essentially over we really wanted to prove our worth in the final match. Tunisia seemed to be a little flatter in match 5, we were able to capitalise on this and take the first set rather quickly. The lessons from the last 2 matches did not reoccur as we played some great volleyball to hold the momentum and take the second, and then third sets. In the end it was a solid match of volleyball that we needed to do on a consistent basis, it wa also a great way to finish on our way to Canada to play the 13th ranked team in the world.