Dueren and Some Other Things

Last weekend was Dueren, another Champions League team, and after our defeat of Friedrichshafen, the number one team in the Bundesliga. To add to the level of difficulty we had to play in Dueren which is not an easy task. From what I've been told, beating Dueren at home is extremely tough. Apparently, last year's finals were decided by home court advantage. Dueren won all of their games at home and Friedrichshafen won all of their home games. Luckily for Friedrichshafen, they got to host the final game of the championship series. Maybe some unnecessary information, but I just wanted to set the stage for how important home court advantage can be sometimes.

Anyways, I take back my statement about Rottenburg being the best gym in the league, Dueren is definitely better. The crowd was louder, more intense and generally more full of energy. Of course, when your team wins all the time, it is easier for the fans to be excited and to create a really cool atmosphere.

The game was actually fairly positive for our team. We played well enough at times to take strings of points and were never completely blown out of the match until the last ten points of the last set. We had opportunities to win the first set and we won the third set in convincing style. In the end, their serving was better than ours, or at least it caused more problems than ours did, and they were able to score more transition points. Possibly because they had the option of setting to their opposite - Quero - who I decided during the match has a fifty-fifty chance of killing the ball no matter what situation he is in. What I mean is, if the set is low and tight and there is a well set up three man block in front of him, he has just as good a chance at killing that ball than if he is looking at a perfect set in a one on one situation. He's a great hitter who is like a box of chocolates. And we all know what that means.

We lost the match and now we move towards the end of the season. We're sitting solidly in fifth with a very small chance of finishing lower. There is still the opportunity to move up at least one place and finish fourth which would mean a great deal to us as we would have home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. After this weekend everything should be a lot more defined.

On another note, we've pretty much run out of middle blockers. Dirk is done for the season with his judo inflicted shoulder injury. Artur is questionable for the time being with a quadricep problem - he has not practiced this week. And that leaves Andy as our last remainig true middle. Nate has done a little work out of the middle for us and we have a second team middle who helps us out at practice but neither is a great solution for our problems. A good story that I think sums up the whole situation comes from yesterday: Jens contacted a former Bayer middle blocker who played on the team a couple of years ago but hasn't touched a ball in about a year to see if he would help us out in training and in the game this weekend. He said he would and came to training yesterday with the plan of easing his way back into things. What happened after about forty five minutes of playing? Jammed his thumb blocking on an attack from Peter. The joint capsule is messed up and the doctor says that it is very unlikely that he can play this weekend. Apparently the gods are against us at the moment.

So, we'll give it a shot and see what happens. I guess the best we can hope for is that no one hurts themselves before we play on Saturday...