The end of Asia Cup

As a lot of you might know, Asia cup did not quite go to plan for the VTAM team. Essentially it can be put down to a single match, the quarter final against Chinese Taipei. We started without Paul Carroll who had an injured shoulder from 2 days earlier, and I was also told that we planned to rotate the passer-hitters a bit from the bench to keep them fresh for the following matches since we only had 3 of them, and more or less the first 2 sets went to plan, Taipei were playing pretty good and were really going all out on their swings, but we managed to stay on top of them the whole way in both sets and win them both, even though it was pretty tight.

The 3rd set started really bad, and it didn't get much better. We were not playing with much confidence and couldn't make any transition opportunities on our serve. At the end of the set we started to get on top of them and won about 6 points in a row, only to go down 25-22 in the end.

The 4th was pretty close up until the middle, and then we started to break away to a 2-3 point lead. I remember at 21-19 i had a tough diving dig opportunity in 6 with my left hand that i didn't quite bring back, I remember being real angry at myself cause I had been nailing them fairly regularly up until that point. Unfortunately it would come back to haunt us. 2 quick points to Chinese Taipei and it was even, they eventually went on to win the set.

The 5th set we again got a good break and were up by at 3-4 points up until about 8-5. Taipei again pegged us back and it was neck and neck. We had the first match point at 14-13, only for Taipei to side out. In the end it took a couple of pretty decent digs and transition swings for the Chinese Taipei team to take the match and leave us playing off for 5th-8th.

I would have to say it was one of the most disappointing losses i've had in my career. In my opinion we should never ever lose to Chinese Taipei, I was pretty upset after the match and I don't think I said too much for a few hours after that.

As to why we lost, its difficult to pin point why. Clearly we did not play a good game of Volleyball, that part is obvious. Probably the thing that sticks out in my mind was our game from beyond the base line. We were very timid in serving, for the last 2 sets I think everybody other than maybe Aidan Zingel was float serving. Because if this our block wasn't able to be as effective and essentially our presence at the net was taken away to some extent. Either way it was not where we wanted to be, i honestly thought we had a good chance to beat everyone in the tournament since no team had overly impressed me.

The next game was against Kazakhstan, who were actually playing pretty well. They had a swing at 24-23 in the 4th to take their 1/4 final against China to 5. So we were rather weary of how they might be. In the end it was a bit of a non-issue, they seemed to struggle much more against the European style play than the Asian one and we were able to beat them rather easily in 3.

In the last match we did what I thought we should of done in the first game against the Koreans and beat them 3-1. In the set we lost we gave up a 2 point lead late in the set to gift them the set.......This seems to be happening a little too often these days.

So in the end a positive way to finish the tournament, just gotta hope that we have learnt a lesson from this tournament, come world champs it might be a far higher price.