World Cup 2007

Well the World Cup has been and gone and now I'm back in Porto. It was a great experience to play against 11 of the best teams the world had to offer. To finish 4-7 and in 8th place was an ok result, however I felt that there was at least 2 games that we let slip. Finishing around 6th would of certainly been much nicer! However what's done is done and we are now ranked #11 in the world which is really nice to see. I'll try and give a bit of a rundown on the tournament and the games! If i can remember back then.

The Korea match was an epic. I don't think we were really playing our best volleyball at this point in time and it probably showed. However we fought and we fought and eventually took the 5th set 29-27. Korea even had a swing for the match at some stage, I think everyone on the bench almost had a heart attack as Phill reached for the ball, but then quickly pulled back as it went wide. Paul was the catalyst of the victory with a lazy 35 points!

The 2nd game was always gonna be tough, Russia are a big physical team that play the game higher abovew the net than probably any team in the world. The first 2 sets were good, we stayed with them and waited paitently for a chance. However in the first it was Russia that made the plays at the end and won the 1st. The 2nd set was similar, however we managed to stay right in there and ended up haveing a set point. Unfortunatelly we werent able to capitilize and after a dubious Russian ace they eventually took the 2nd. The 3rd was quick and painful 25-10 to Russia, yeh.....we just sorta lost concentration and against a team like Russia that was all that is needed to lose badly!
Match 3 was against the hosts Japan. In my opinion it was our best match of the tournament. In front of 15,000 screaming Japanese fans we beat up on them 3-0. Of course it was great to beat the Japanese at this tournament, but more importantly we maintained the mental edge we have over the Japanese team after beating them in Olympic Quals 2004 and Asians 2007. Cant stress how important this was when we have to play them in Olympic qualifiers in May next year.
Between the 3rd and 4th match we changed cities from Saitama to Hiroshima. The first match was against Tunisia. We had played Tunisia a lot in the last few years and it had always been tight between us. This game was no exception. We started well winning the first pretty comfortably. However then we seemed to lose our rhythm a little. We were having difficulty putting the ball down as Tunisia were playing a great defensive game. We ended up losing the 2nd and were in dire straights in the 3rd down 22-15. Then like many times this year, we performed a great escape. We managed to make a couple of points before I got blocked and we went down 24-19. After sideing out Kaz went back to serve. 7 serves later it was 26-24 to the good guys. We managed to make some good block touches and the outsides were able to convert them for point after point. I also managed to get a 1 on 1 block in there too, which is a miracle in itself cause I never get a block! So after that we were down early in the 4th, but we kept our composure and jumped the Tunisians after 16 to take the match.

So at this point in time we were sitting pretty at 3-1 and looking to make it 4-1 against Argentina. At this point the tournament was starting to take it's toll, so for recovery we were sent down to the side of the hotel to jump into the rather cold water down there! The Russians who were on a smoking break all thought it was rather funny, personally I just thought it was cold!

So Argentina had just come of a shock loss to Japan, so we were confident of doing the job against them. We started the first pretty poorly, and couldn't catch up the early deficit. The 2nd we started better and were able to pull away and take the set. The 3rd was pretty terrible, we lost a lot of points in succession st various times and lost the set pretty badly. However it looked like we would bounce back in the 4th leading by a few points for most of the way, but we couldnt finish it off, some big transition plays from the Argies gave them the match in 4. Argentina certainly played better volleball than they had the day before with Milinkovic and 1 of the other outsides really hurting us. Still i felt we could of played better and really had a good chance to take it to a 5th set.

Next match was against Brazil, needless to say a tough one. We ended up losing the match 3-0, but it really was not a bad effort from us. We managed to stay with them a lot of the match and it was only a few plays or errors here and there that cost us. It was certainly an improvement from when we played them in the world cup a year before. It's always good to see what progress the team has made over this time.

Another tough game againt the Bulgarians, and unfortunatelly not a good game from us. They blocked really well and we couldn't find an answer. It was dissapointing to play a game like this after playing relativelly well the day before, still we had no time to relax cause we had another tough match against the US the next day. The US unfortunatelly was similar to the day before, we didn't play near our best and it simply wasn't good enough against a team like the US. We got blocked a lot and never manged to put any decent transition opportunities away. Again dissapointing, at this stage everyone was looking forward to changing cities to Tokyo and having a crack at the last 3 teams in the tournament.

We were looking forward to the Spanish match, although they were European champions we flet we could knock them off as we had done to them a few months earlier. However it was not to be. Our mid-late tournament slump continued and the game was a very lacklustre affair from both teams. Spain did nothing special, but they didn't have to, we made to many errors and lost the match pretty convincingly 3-0 in the end.

Puerto Rico had been having a stellar tournament, beating the US 3-1 and Spain 3-0 they were going to be tough. Today was a different story for our team. We came out more hungry for a victory and played some great defence to keep the Perto Ricans on the back foot. We lost concentration a little in the 2nd set but fought back well to take the 3rd and 4th and the match. This sewed up a top 8 finish which was very important for the world rankings.

The Egypt match was quite simply a match we should of won. We didn't play with the spirit or the hunger that we had in the previous game and this caused a few too many errors from our side. All in all a dissapointing way to end the tournament.

Outside of the Volleyball Japan as always was a great place to visit. or the first time I was able to get to Tokyo and have a look around. An absolutelly incredible city with skyscrapers as far as you can see, roads that dip up and down up to 6 stories high at least and a subway map that would confuse anyway! I thouroughly enjoyed all of it!!!