Aarhus + Pokal Semi

After not doing anything for what felt like months, we finally got the chance to play again last weekend. Because of DHG dropping out of the elite and the national team playing in Hungary our schedule has been really sparse for a long time. It was really nice to play a match again.

So, going into Aarhus we had no idea what to expect. After such a long lay off we didn’t know how we would react and we had heard all sorts of rumors about what kind of team Aarhus would play with, so it was interesting to finally see what we were up against. They did have a new Brazilian middle, but the Tunisian has apparently gone back to Northern Africa. Lars Hoppe also stayed in street clothes on the sideline as an assistant coach.

We didn’t really show any signs of rust and played a good all around match. Our serving improved as the match developed and that made things easier and easier for us. We played especially well in the second set and generally had a really good time being back on the court. The highlight was definitely Shaun’s four or five stuff blocks on the outside.

It was an important match for us as we knew that we had to be ready for Tuesday’s pokal semi-final and this was our only real chance to get up into match gear.

Tuesday started incredibly poorly. Down 7-1 is not the way you want to start a big match with a big home crowd. Luckily, we rebounded pretty well and got the points back pretty quickly. I’m not saying that this happened to Gentofte but sometimes it seems like it can be a bad thing to jump out to a big lead right at the start of a match, it can make you drop your guard a little bit and start to think that everything is going to come easily. Then when the other team steps up their tempo it is hard to get back into the game.

Anyways, in my opinion, the game was a really good one. It seems that Gentofte matches up better against us than anyone else in the league. Clearly, our two matches against them have been closer than any of the others we have played. Maybe it’s because they have a good game plan against us or because they get excited to play us or because they play a style that is harder for us to stop than others. But there is no question that they have pushed us more than any other team.

Shaun and Geo carried us when things got close but everyone played solid. After the initial 7 point run, our passing settled down and did an incredible job all match long. I think Gentofte missed a lot of serves but the ones that they hit in were generally good serves and our passers dealt well with them. That made it easy to distribute the ball. I also think that our serves gave us a few more easy points than they got. In the end, we did enough to keep ourselves a few points ahead almost the whole time and even though it stayed fairly close they couldn’t quite get over that hump.

We’re excited to be in the finals in January. I’ve only played in one other Pokalfinal and I’m really happy to be going back. It’s always fun to get the chance to play against a good team in front of a lot of people and the fact that it is another team from Fyn should make the whole thing a little bit more interesting.

Now we look ahead to our last match in Hvidovre on Sunday. I don’t know how we will react after a, to be honest, little bit draining last few days. I also don’t know how healthy we are going to be but hopefully we’ll have enough to play well and go into the Christmas break with a good performance.