World League roundup, week 1

I wish I could have covered more than just the one match I did, but the stars didn’t align the right way for that to be a possibility. So I’ll give a little retrospective on the week that was (to coin a phrase).

The first match of the tournament pitted Finland against Portugal, in Helsinki. Tuomas Sammuelvo’s boys were more than up to the task, winning pretty easily (25-13, 29-27, 25-18). Nobody reached double-digits in kills for the Fins, as they spread their options pretty nicely. Floor captain Antti Siltala led them with 9. Using some strong serving pressure, the Fins kept the Portuguese out-of-system much of the night. They led throughout set 1. It was neck-and-neck through set 2, and in set 3 the Portugal team actually led as late as 12-10 before the Fins scored 15 of the final 21 points of the match. Valdir Sequiera led all scorers for Portugal with 13 kills, but none of his teammates got any more than 5. The Fins were aided by 29 scoring errors from the Portuguese side, committing just 13 themselves.

The next day, the two teams played an amazingly competitive match. Portugal came out on top (23-25, 25-23, 25-23, 23-25, 15-12). Tough to imagine a closer match than that. Valdir again led all scorers in this match with 23 kills, while teammate Alex Ferreira had 13 to go with an impressive 7 service aces. Mikko Oivanen led the Fins with 20 kills. All five sets were as close as the linescore suggests, with Portugal’s first set point in the third at 24-19 being the biggest lead anyone had all night. Then the fifth set had nine ties before the Portuguese scored the match’s last three points.

I’ve been told I shouldn’t think so lowly of the Portugal team, and perhaps I won’t going forward.

After Canada’s four-set win over the Netherlands on their first day of World League play, which I wrote up, the Dutch team returned the favour with a (25-22, 25-17, 20-25, 25-23) win on day two of their series. Wytze Kooistra led all scorers with 20 kills, with Thijs ter Horst contributing 18 for a multi-faceted Dutch offence. Gavin Schmitt had 16 kills to lead the Canadians, but he had just 3 through the first two sets, as he and setter Dustin Schneider had a little trouble connecting in the first sections of the match. Gord Perrin was second for them with only 8. Despite a pretty pronounced blocking advantage for Canada (13 total team blocks to 6 for the Dutch), the match went the way of the Netherlands team. Each of the four sets was close until a late run decided it.

In Korea, the homestanding team were the only one to end week 1 with two wins, triumphing in four sets both nights. Night one’s final was (25-22, 25-20, 21-25, 25-19). Tatsuya Fukuzawa led all scorers for Japan with 14 kills. The next highest scorers lined up right after him as Jeon Kwang-in had 13 to lead the Koreans, and Park Chul-woo and Yu Koshikawa each contributed 12 to be second-best for their respective sides. A potentially important development happened late in set 3, as Korea’s top outside hitter Moon Sung-min had to leave the match with a knee injury. As noted, Jeon proved up to the task of taking on the additional scoring burden, but the injury was such that it ruled Moon out entirely for night two. That night, the Koreans won by a count of  (25-21, 25-23, 11-25, 25-22), illustrating one of volleyball’s more charming oddities, that you can outscore your opponent and still lose (do the math — Japan won more total points in the match). Jeon answered the call again, coming up with 22 kills to quite convincingly lead the way. Timely errors by the Japanese late in the close sets paved the way for Korea to come out on top once more.

All six teams will again be in action next week, as Canada host Portugal, Korea host Finland, and the Dutch team host Japan. The other two pools will also begin their play next week.